Out on the northern fringes of greater Paris lie 700 hectares of wheat fields known as the Gonesse Triangle. They are located right next to some of the poorest parts of Paris, where unemployment is high and hopes are low. The town of Gonesse itself has no rail links to the rest of Paris, the closest station being 2.6km away, which means it’s a pain in the ass to get in and out of there for work, studies, health care, etc.
As part of a huge package to help improve the lot of Paris’s outer suburbs and avoid new riots like the fairly epic 2005 and 2007 ones, the government decided to build new metro line 17 through Gonesse (the dotted pink line above) and green-light a massive construction project (ahem: “leisure center”) covering 80 of the hectares where wheat currently grows:
Europacity was intended to be Disneyland without the entrance fees. All kinds of glorious statistics were bandied about: 30 million visitors per year, 10 000 jobs, the return of Jesus Christ our Saviour, and more.
It always gets me when you see the projections for new jobs created by a megaproject. Either these jobs are going to lead to job losses elsewhere, or you have to increase overall tourist numbers (and CO2 emissions).
And as over-tourism becomes a global nightmare, it is only a matter of time before Parisians shit a collective brick. It hasn’t really happened here yet like in Barcelona and Venice, but I can smell it coming.
The ecologists were on to Europacity long before the design was even finalized. In March 2011, the collective for the Gonesse Triangle centralized the work of 15 NGOs. They were quick to label Europacity a BUP or Big Useless Project.
Catchy.
Some of them started gardening on land slated for redevelopment:
Tending her rows of courgettes, leeks and potatoes, Cécile Coquel, a telecoms worker and guerilla gardener, stood firm despite local authorities’ recent warning that everything must be ripped up and the field vacated.
“These are the vegetables of the resistance!” she proclaimed. “We’ll fight to save this land.”
Indeed, one of the ecologists’ propositions was to turn the 80 hectares of wheat fields into an epic market garden for the local region, thus providing more employment than a wheat field (of which France definitely has no shortage).
“The irony is that we’re right next to Le Bourget where France signed the Paris climate accords and then Emmanuel Macron promised to ‘make our planet great again’,” sighed Coquel, 46, a former Communist councillor. “This type of giant out-of-town development seems like a relic of the past. If we instead replanted this land with market-gardening, we could feed the surrounding area with local produce”.
Things have been going pear-shaped for Europacity for a while, but the fatal blow was when the political calculations of our great leaders finally converged to the following epiphany:
We cannot build massive shit on agricultural land and expect to get away with it any longer.
Europacity was definitively cancelled yesterday.
This debacle follows last year’s abandonment of the Notre-Dames-des-Landes airport project in western France, also on agricultural land, after a 40 year struggle.
Small steps. Small steps.
These do however seem like minor turning points in the battle to keep Earth habitable for at least a few humans, when one country’s politicians have decided that—at the very least—they should not be trying to actively make CO2 emissions worse through massive new construction sites that lead to more tourism.
Not that construction in France is on a downward trajectory or anything. For a country with an almost flat net population, you’d be surprised at how many apartment blocks and individual homes are still being built, many of which match communist brutalist architecture if not in style then definitely in hideousness.
But back to Europacity and the big picture.
This shit is getting real.
Inequality in France—a rich country—is coming face to face with what happens when you realise you don’t know how to keep the “poor” masses happy and “save the planet” at the same time.
There’s no obvious solution here as long as we all keep expecting that our lives should get better, and that consumerism will do the hard graft to get us there. Those days are on the way out, and society is floundering about like a fish on a hook, trying to work out what happens next.
In any case, as long as massive and visible inequality continues to poison modern life here and elsewhere, there will never arise some kind of shared feeling like, We are all in this together.
And without that feeling, no reckoning can be had as to what kind of life we need to learn to be happy with in the years to come.