We have spoken about Paris' Tour Montparnasse before on the blog, and spoken more broadly about the city's discomfort with tall buildings. The Tour Montparnasse is the only skyscraper within the city limits of Paris. If you include the Eiffel Tower, it is one of only two really tall things, though this will soon increase to three with the addition of Herzog and de Meuron's new trapezoidal-shaped tower (now under construction).

The Tour Montparnasse turned 50 this year and so people are now writing about it again. In my opinion, this recent piece in the New Yorker, by Colin Marshall, is particularly thoughtful. Here are two important points that he makes. The first has to do with the fact that kind of old usually isn't enough when it comes to architecture. You need buildings to be really old before they get fully appreciated:

Architectural fashion treasures hundred-and-fifty-year-old structures but derides fifty-year-old ones; hence the works of brutalism that have faced the wrecking ball in recent years. “The destruction of brutalist buildings is more than the destruction of a particular mode of architecture,” Jonathan Meades says, in his television documentary “Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.” “It is like burning books. It’s a form of censorship of the past, a discomfiting past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.”

The second point is maybe an obvious one:

Aberrations like the Tour Montparnasse only underscore how much Paris remains Haussman’s city, its core frozen in a nineteenth century whose built environment can be restored, and in some cases discreetly renovated, but which—so the severity of the restrictions implies—can never fundamentally be improved upon.

This is, however, a crucial point. Because it directs to why the Tour Montparnasse is so jarring to many, or perhaps most. It is jarring because it is so obviously different from its surrounding 19th century context. It is clearly not that. But as Marshall points out, one way to address this would be to simply add more 21st century context throughout the city.

Of course, this is easier said than done. It would require a new mental model -- one that accepts that the built form of Paris is not static and can be allowed to evolve. We're not there yet. But maybe the current renovation of Tour Montparnasse, or the city's new triangle tower, will give people a fresh set of eyes when it comes to buildings taller than 37 meters.

Photo by Maeva Hemon on Unsplash

This is an intriguing idea:

Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has been allocated to participatory projects in recent years, but in Cascais, more than fifteen per cent of the budget flows through the program, and the percentage can float higher if voter turnout rises. Cascais is surprising in another way: its mayor, Carlos Carreiras, is both a champion of participatory budgeting and a member of a center-right political party. Participatory budgeting is often considered a tool of the left, but its role in Cascais suggests that it could have a broader appeal; part of the theory behind it is that citizens can be better than officials at knowing how money should be spent.

Of course, it won't solve all of our problems:

Even in the best of circumstances, participatory budgeting faces some structural limitations. Citizens can’t use it to raise the minimum wage, for instance, or to reconfigure affordable-housing policy, or to ban single-use plastics. As it stands, the approach “will never change the destiny of a poor neighborhood,” Giovanni Allegretti, a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, told me. Allegretti noted that participatory budgeting is mainly a competitive process involving limited resources with no long-term strategy; it doesn’t eliminate the need for other policy interventions. But when it functions effectively, participatory budgeting can give direct political power to those who might otherwise have very little of it.

There is something very compelling about empowering people to come up with new ideas, compete with others for the best ones, and then participate in public decisions. It also strikes me as a possibly efficient way to force: "We only have this much money to spend. What should we spend it on? Spending on this means not spending on that. Time to make a decision."

And now it has me wondering: If we asked Toronto whether it wanted to spend over $1 billion to rebuild the Gardiner Expressway east or spend it on other things, what do you think it would say?

For the rest of the above article, click here.

The New Yorker recently published a "daily shout" on Instagram called, How You Know You've Made It, by City. It is essentially a series on city stereotypes, and it's pretty funny. Sorry Cleveland. If you can't see the embed below, click here.