HOWZAT

The market closed in 1969, shunted out, in the spirit of the age, by Orly airport, the pavilions demolished two years later. “With Les Halles gone, Paris is gone,” wrote the historian Louis Chevalier. Not quite. But the demolition began a decade of political turmoil over the market’s replacement that left it a hole for most of the 1970s.

Across the Channel Covent Garden was being saved by community action from the developers, and around the West big state gestures were not the done thing at all. Paris, as ever, carried on regardless.

Today, Paris has had enough of grands projets. Or at least grand gestures.

Delanoë is said to have agonised over the choice, delaying the decision all summer and autumn, because of the project’s symbolism. Another icon to pull in the tourists? Or the one most popular with the public? Mangin had the biggest popular vote, and the support of local community groups and Paris’s powerful Green Party. And Delanoë knows a vote-winner when he sees one. In place of Chirac’s mirror-glassed elephant will come, very pointedly, the people ’s choice, picked, says Delanoë, by a “truly democratic process”. And one which points decisively towards the city’s future.

Paris may be favourite to win the 2012 Olympics next year, and still the world’s No 1 tourist destination, the very model of modern high-density urbane, urban living. But it’s in deep trouble, its crown in danger of being snatched by the sparkling European cities that have emerged in its wake.

Like Les Halles, Paris is beginning to look rather dated. It is not an innovative global city of networkers and businessmen but a bourgeois, self-satisfied, admittedly lovely mirage, represented in an urban landscape of strict planning rules that ensure Paris remains embalmed as an image of itself in cream mansard roofs with no struggling artists in its garrets. High taxation and labour costs and a landscape rigidly Botoxed to keep beautiful doesn’t rake in the cash in the long term. So Delanoë has to walk a very, very fine line, loosening up the city, but not so far as to ruin the quality of life that is its number one draw for tourists, citizens and business.

Which means tinkering with the city, not rebuilding it. Delanoë has proved remarkably adept so far. His Paris plage was exactly the kind of win-win publicity stunt that Ken Livingstone has always promised London, now being copied in cities across the world. Paris has also extinguished the car, but more subtly than Livingstone, by slowly choking it out with more (and proper) cycle paths and bus lanes. Even skyscrapers are promised. None has been built in

25 years, enforced by strict rules that limit buildings to eight floors in the centre — popular with citizens but not with businessmen after modern offices and lower-income families after cheaper housing. And more projets are planned: only petit ones — such as a new tram system to cut traffic on the boulevards further and a 365-day swimming pool on the Seine. And, of course, Les Halles, due to complete, says Delano ë, “a long time before 2012”.

I bet. No, not for the Olympics. That’s when pundits predict he’ll bid for the presidency. Of course Delanoë is no different from Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand or Chirac. But maybe, just maybe, he and his architecture will be better.