GRIGNY, France — Paris is about to get bigger, much bigger. Next year, assuming plans move ahead, the city and a ring of inner suburbs will be joined, in an effort to redress a century’s worth of urban decisions that have exacerbated the country’s gaping cultural divide.
The new Métropole du Grand Paris, or Metropolis of Greater Paris, will include nearly seven million people, more than triple the population now living in the central city. It will swallow rich suburbs to the west. But it should also provide better access to jobs and to business hubs and, if it really works, a greater sense of belonging for millions of immigrant families who live in poverty and isolation on the city’s southern, northern and eastern fringes. Resources would be redistributed, in particular those dealing with housing. The complexion of Paris would change.
France is scrambling to remedy the inequities highlighted by the Charlie Hebdo attack, troubles that have unraveled the nation’s social fabric and alienated Muslim and migrant youths, radicalizing a few. Urban renewal and remapping the capital are a start.
But France must also reckon with its abiding racism, which pushed poor and unwanted citizens out from central Paris in the first place. Those people came to towns like this, in the second ring of suburbs, close to Orly airport, an entry point for generations of North African immigrants who are now part of the melting pot in Grigny.
The trip here from central Paris takes an hour by commuter train, the glitter and glory of Montmartre and the Louvre giving way to the silence of a concrete railroad station below a housing project. Across a highway, a second project hunkers behind prisonlike walls: La Grande Borne, Amedy Coulibaly’s former home. Mr. Coulibaly is the terrorist who murdered a police officer in the street and then four hostages at a kosher supermarket.
One recent afternoon, the mayor of Grigny, Philippe Rio, oversaw a graduation ceremony at a community center in La Grande Borne, handing out diplomas to a dozen adults who had finished a job-training program. Unemployment nears 40 percent among young adults here; businesses in the office parks lining the highway on the other side of the wall don’t do much hiring locally. There is one small bakery to serve La Grande Borne’s 16,000 residents. The mayor cited a report showing France now spends 47 percent more on elementary school students in Paris than on those in poor suburbs like this.
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But when the economy tanked in the 1970s, the layout became a disaster, impossible to police. Things only got worse during the 1980s. President François Mitterrand saw the future in cars and single-family houses that leapfrogged poor suburbs for new settlements. Residents who could still afford to leave places like the Grands Ensembles fled, abandoning them to mostly poor immigrants.
They had little say over their fate. French government is top-down. Community activism is a foreign concept. When Lionel Jospin became the country’s Socialist prime minister during the 1990s, he obliged wealthier suburbs to construct subsidized housing or pay stiff fines. Some opted for fines. After Mr. Jospin, French leaders undid employment programs and community policing initiatives that had made some headway. The mayor of Grigny, one of the few Communists left, told me his town hasn’t had a full-time police station since 2002.
Parisians note that 13 percent of city residents today live below the poverty line, 20 percent in subsidized housing. Paris isn’t only a wealthy playground for tourists. But historic preservation has made it tougher to diversify neighborhoods. Officials promise 30 percent subsidized housing by 2030. Billions pour into renovating housing blocks and retrofitting barren suburban neighborhoods with streets, shops, parks and transit. But with limited results.
“It’s part of the French Republic idea that as citizens we’re all race-blind and equal,” says Marie-Hélène Bacqué, a professor of sociology and urban studies at the University of Paris. “So the country even prohibits official surveys according to race or ethnicity. How can we begin to deal with problems like the poor suburbs if we won’t face basic facts?”
As Nicolas Grivel, director general of ANRU, the state agency for urban renewal, put it: “We need to change the transport system and the government of greater Paris. But we also have to do away with the psychological ring around the city.”
Mr. Rio, the Grigny mayor, said he still believes that can happen: “This city and its urban development must become a laboratory for the republic.” He told me he met the previous day with France’s president, François Hollande, and said he stressed the same thing.
“I told him we need to do better in places like Grigny,” he said, “because this is a concentration of all the problems now facing France.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Paris Aims to Embrace Its Estranged Suburbs. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
