It is always intriguing to see a dispute
arise between European capital cities in direct competition over tourism, at
the exact moment when the Commission in Brussels is pondering the unity of
Destination Europe and how the member states can complement each other. It is
true that London and Paris, which have become sisters in arms of sorts, connected
by the Eurostar, still have certain instincts originating from the times when
they were sisters at war. Does their warring past live on? What should we make
of it all, really?
Controversy
Controversy arose a few days ago when
London decided to publish its tourism figures for 2013, thus stealing the show
from Paris which apparently had not finished totting up its own figures, and
whose officials are trying to cope with the fast approaching municipal
elections.
It was the article in the Figaro of 16 January, seemingly, which set it all off. “In 2013, even more people jostled in the halls of the British Museum, London’s leading attraction, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery. They flew in the cabins of the London Eye or walked the dark corridors of the Tower of London.”
The article goes on to say that, thanks to record numbers of visitors, the
city’s leaders expected to announce that, in surpassing the 16 million mark for
foreign tourists, the capital of the UK had dethroned Bangkok and Paris as the
most visited city on the planet. Though the criteria may not perfectly align,
Paris received 15.9 million visitors in 2012. New York came in fourth.
The reasons for this? They say the strong impact of the positive, youthful image put forward by the Olympics, and the stable-family image produced by the Jubilee ceremonies, yet it is also by dint of focusing positively on certain fashionable parts of town which are driving the market. The West End, it seems, has further strengthened its position:
“these visitors spend big: £5 billion (€6 billion) in the first 6 months of 2013, an increase of 12%. The West End, a district of shops, restaurants and theatres, has more economic weight than the City and even than the entire British agricultural sector.”
The article stresses the contribution made to this
success by the large-scale historical exhibitions such as ‘Pompeii’ as well as
the exhibition celebrating rock and fashion icon David Bowie.
Having visited London fairly regularly over
the last 30 years on the trails of silk, spa towns or art schools, the only
thing I see is progress. The UK capital has managed to impose an image of
modernity, flouting the past yet still holding on to its Victorian-island
exoticism and its spirit of punk freedom. It is a slightly risky balancing act
at time, but it has paid off long-term. Ten years ago I even considered moving
to the city when I took my retirement, for the very reason of its creative
mobility. That said, I would not have chosen the West End but the East End or
Greenwich, in the areas along the Thames where living there gives you the
feeling of being part of a family of skippers waiting to set back out Around
the World in a little more than 80 days.
Anyway, Paris has immediately responded by contesting the results:
“The only comparable figures available today on the number of visitors been London and Paris are the 2012 figures, as the 2013 figures are not yet consolidated.”
Further details:
“In 2012, Paris (105km2)
welcomed 29 million tourists (all nationalities) against 27.6 million in London.
Besides, Greater London (1,500km2) covers an area roughly equivalent
to that of the Ile-de-France. The figures for Paris do not include, for
example, Versailles or Disneyland Paris.”
Clearly, the word handicap really was
invented by the Brits.
The target?
The Chinese, of course!
That said, over recent weeks there has no doubt been a rise in the number of comments attacking French journalists’ the overly respectful tone toward the President, the supposedly catastrophic state of the French economy, condemnation of the lack of entrepreneurial spirit of the French, for whom the word ‘entrepreneur’ apparently does not appear in their vocabulary, and Paris’s high living costs. Whether they are orchestrated or not, these comments only serve to forge differences and uphold prejudices. Be they from the UK or the USA, the comments all point toward the same thing:
‘The Fall of France’. In short, socialist France is badly run and socialist Paris is the most illustrative example of this as uncertainty is increasing in the capital and the Parisians’ aggressive attitude is only getting worse.
Even
Scarlett Johansson has voiced her chagrin: “The actress mentions the
‘frustrating’ way that Parisians walk. ‘I’m from New York and I assume that I’m
an amazing walker (…) you kind of avoid [each other], it’s a choreography. (…) I
started getting really aggressive with people now and I don’t care!’” The star lives
mainly, however, in Paris.
On that point, nobody has ever really
measured the comparative effect on tourism generated by the films of Woody
Allen, for whom Johansson has been the muse in recent years, made in London and
Paris, like they have for those made about Rome and Barcelona, highlighting the
positive effect generated on the number of visitors. To Rome With Love is, however, no better or worse than Midnight in Paris – just as clichéd, anyway
– but what of Vicky Cristina Barcelona
or Scoop, which were better films?
Tourism magazines seem a little lost in risky comparisons, even though it is
true that these cities, which welcomed the director with open arms, were hoping
for some payoff and the films have fed transatlantic comments from weekend
tourists attracted by the reassuring clichés that offer them an easy means of
identification.
The crowd which gathered on 1 January this
year around Place du Tertre in Montmartre when all of Paris’s museums were
closed shows that clichés too die hard. Many
tourists were visibly expecting Picasso to appear outside the Bateau-Lavoir and
go have a beer in the local café. However, it is not actually the Italians,
Spanish, English or Americans who are the targets of this battle-by-press
release: today, it is visitors from China who are making the difference.
Atmospheres
Although the quarrel between the two
capitals has died down as fast as it arose, a slight feeling of bitterness will
perhaps linger, and then eventually fade away. Council teams come and go, their
policies with them. Instead, why not take advantage of this timely debate to
make some comparisons of a more sentimental nature, or rather one more involved
and more personal. I love these two
cities of love, but I cannot ignore the fact that I was born in Paris and lived
there almost constantly for 46 years.
During one of my last two trips to the UK in 2012, I could not hold back a thought which arose from the notable successes of the art exhibitions I saw, in particular the Tate Modern’s:
“I think that
the ambiance of the city also plays a big part. Whether you arrive from the
northern bank, crossing the Millennium Bridge, or you walk from Southwark Underground
station, discovering a string of new buildings for sale with designer
furnishings already installed and easily visible through open windows, the
English capital makes its French sister city look old, a city which in
comparison seems resigned to gradually becoming simply an open-air museum, an
excessively precious box for its prestigious heritage. In London, Foster
appears to have brought along in his wake a surge of unusual shapes, seemingly
designed to compete with one another, unusual at least to the ‘old continent’
that I come from.”
Not to exaggerate too much, but after only
five years away it was like I had discovered a completely new world, as though
all of a sudden I found myself in the city from Jacques Tati’s Playtime, having only just left behind
the 18th century quarters that Jane Austen was familiar with. I must
admit that these two elements have always lived alongside one another, but the
spectacle of a new, modern and liberal city, speculative and free took over me
after walking a dozen kilometres and visiting five museums in two days. In any
case, an image far removed from the one I got from the students of Goldsmith
College – punks, drag queens and followers of Derrida and Bourdieu all at once
– or the one I got from the crowds at Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s.
In spring 2012, I also wrote:
“schizophrenia
often forms part of the charm of cities… and as in novels, the killer hiding
behind the flower beds ends his confession with a justification of his next
disappearance…” I could not overlook the presence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
double characters in London.
As for Paris, which I truly have seen as a
tourist over the last ten years, changing district practically each time I
visited, I slowly came to feel cradled and comforted by the length of my
memories. Are my own footsteps across this city essentially nostalgic? Am I
searching for only the parts of town which have remained basically unchanged
since my adolescence: the popular and ‘ethnic’ 20th arrondissement, the Mouffetard district
and its local shops, the streets named after famous painters in the Gobelins district, the artist studios of the 14th arrondissement, the Jardindes plantes, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Butte-aux-Cailles,
Butte Montmartre out to the suburban
area where I grew up? Or is it actually that Paris has become a museum town
that is not going to change any more except in its regular restorations of some
precious pieces of heritage? A city well protected from liberal speculation now
that La Défense and the Porte d’Italie areas have quietened down
into the focus of complaints about triumphant modern architecture and the
Pompidou Centre, that piece of “20th Century Heritage”, patiently
waits until it has the new canopy on Les
Halles to talk to?
Paris truly is a museum, to which tourists affix padlocks so that nobody can remove the memory of their being there and so that the city itself remains closely attached to its past and theirs. Yet we all know that the railings of the Pont des Arts are changed regularly to make space for new padlocks, lest the bridge ends up falling into the Seine due to the excess weight.
A symbol of the illusion which have been removed?
If we believe museum visitor numbers – and if we believe our eyes when we pass by the pyramid at the Louvre and the entrances to the Musée d’Orsay, the Orangerie and the Grand Palais – it is no illusion at all.
“The 14 municipal museums – including the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Carnavalet museum, Palais Galliera and the Petit Palais – now brought together under the public institution Paris Musées, last year welcomed 3,037,766 visitors, according to a City of Paris press release. The permanent collections, which have been free to view since 2002, welcomed 1.36 million visitors, a number which has held firm against the previous year. However, the number of visitors to temporary exhibitions (1.674 million) has increased by more than 65% compared with the previous year, a leap which owes to the marked success of the Keith Haring exhibition which welcomed around 300,000 people last summer at the Musée d’Art Moderne. (…) Fashion museum Palais Galliera, which reopened late September after renovations, also enjoyed great success thanks to the exhibitions ‘Paris haute couture’ (at the Town Hall, more than 200,000 visitors) and Alaia.”
So the figures speak for
themselves.
Urban
innovations
If we put aside the area of architectural
imagery – the two capitals’ iconic and emblematic buildings already built or in
the process thereof such as Libeskind’s Tour Signal La Défense versus Renzo Piano’s The Shard – and look instead at the urban
projects designed to improve the lives of much more people, I think the two cities
are level pegging. Here, the contrast between the two lies in the continuity of
their differences: London managing to keep its large parks in the heart of the
city while Paris has safeguarded its small green spaces – the public parks – in
the centre of town and pushed the large ones back to the outskirts (Bois de
Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne).
I appreciate, at what I think is their true
worth, the creations of Gilles Clément such as the Quai Branly garden or Parc André Citroën,
as well as the thematic gardens of Parc de la Villette and particularly
Chemetov’s bamboo garden or even the greenway flowing out from the old Gare de
la Bastille. All of these examples display genuine innovation based on updating
the function of the urban garden and a full biological, botanical and
agronomical review of green spaces and the autonomy of the plants which lie at
the heart of the concept. I cannot wait to see whether at the start of their
mandate the new city council decide to make a greenway of avenue Foch, between
the Arc de Triomphe and Porte Dauphine leading out to Bois de Boulogne.
Similarly, I see ambitious projects popping up in London, also offering new green solutions, such as the Garden Bridge project by Thomas Heatherwick, the creator of the ‘cauldron’ which brought all the flames together into one in the Olympic Games opening ceremony. The idea behind Garden Bridge is to connect the north and south banks of the Thames by a suspended garden filled with trees and wild plants left to run wild.
"There will be grasses, trees, wild flowers, and plants, unique to London's natural riverside habitat. And there will be blossom in the spring and even a Christmas tree in mid-winter. I believe it will bring to Londoners and visitors alike peace and beauty and magic."
Just as innovative is Norman Foster’s
proposal to install cycle paths over the city’s railway lines, a plan being
watched intently the world over. “The proposal… would connect more than six
million residents to an elevated network of car-free bicycle paths built above
London’s existing railway lines if approved.”
It seems, then, that we are not short of ideas either side of the Channel.
So how
do we move away from the false debates?
Translation : Alistair Cowie
