John Lichfield: Our Man In Paris

My 14-year-old daughter goes every Friday evening to an athletics class at a stadium just outside the Paris city boundary. To her fellow runners – black, brown and white, big and small – she is known as la petite Parisienne (the little Parisian girl).

Clare is actually quite big and not really a Parisian. All the same, to the children in her running club, aged 10 to 15, she speaks with an impossibly posh French accent and she comes from a strange and alien place, the city of Paris.

They, too, can speak received French when they want to. They prefer to speak – deliberately exaggerating to tease her – the rich, complex, clipped slang of the Paris suburbs, a mixture of Arabic, English and African languages with French grammar and French words spoken backwards or clipped in half.

The athletics stadium where her running class is held is 100 metres from the Boulévard Périphérique and the boundary of the city of Paris proper. It is, nonetheless, in the banlieues and – although not in a troubled or dangerous suburb – part of a very different world.

The urban motorway which hugs the boundary of Paris proper is a sort of 10-lane medieval city wall. Inside the Périphérique is the beautiful city beloved of tourists and the home, for the most part, of the white and the well-off. Outside the Périphérique are the banlieues, a few of them leafy, wealthy and white; some of them poor and abandoned and dangerous; most of them a dynamic, incoherent, multiracial jumble.

President Nicolas Sarkozy took a bold, and somewhat puzzling, initiative last week. He selected 10 teams to think up visions for a "Greater Paris". They will report back next year.

The idea is sensible and long overdue. But President Sarkozy's initiative has, nonetheless, puzzled and alarmed many people. The Elysée Palace has jumped straight to the building stage. The Socialist leadership of the Paris town hall and the greater Paris area have been kept at arm's length.

Critics fear that M. Sarkozy has no real interest in breaking down the invisible wall between Paris and its banlieues. Instead, they say, his plan is a smokescreen behind which property developers will be encouraged to create vast, new satellite cities of offices. Already, plans are going ahead for three new tower blocks.

This ambitious project was launched four years ago by the former head of the council in the wealthy Hauts de Seine department. His name? Nicolas Sarkozy.

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