Paris is back on the drawing board. Ordered by President Nicolas Sarkozy to reimagine the capital as a world class city, teams of internationally renowned architects have 10 strategies for creating a metropolitan area known as the Grand Paris is the first major redesign since the Napoleonic Wars era. Their ideas ranged from the prosaic to the fanciful. But they all say that the Paris public transport system is saturated, its periphery spoiled by ugly housing projects, and its suburbs an undefined prevalence of isolated cities does not work.

The government hired the design team after a game last year, a more optimistic time for the economic outlook in France started to look so bleak. But it was never entirely clear what their proposals. The political complications are formidable, as the Paris region consists of about 400 different local authorities. The death of the overall plans for urban development, large and small, already exists. And the last time someone managed to review the Paris widespread in the 1850s when Emperor Louis Napoleon replaced Warren slums with grand boulevards and perfectly adapted stone buildings.