Last month, from the comfort of my London home, I watched the final stage of the Tour de France around the streets of Paris, as one-hundred-and-sixty brightly clad cyclists completed the last day of the race, whose total course measured just over 3,300km. After a processional ride into the city, the contest began in earnest with the final section of the route taking the riders three times up the narrow, slippery, cobbled streets of Montmartre, past the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, and then down towards to the finish line on the Champs-Élysée. It was a sporting spectacle of the highest quality, a hotly competitive finale – after three weeks of intense racing – set amidst the many famous monuments of the French capital, the whole route packed with enthusiastic spectators, despite the pouring rain. I wish I could have been there in person, to see first-hand the culmination of the justly famous race in this justly famous city.
It is hard to imagine anything comparable in London, except perhaps the five-day Test Match at the Oval that took place at the start of this month, in which India beat England by six runs, in one of the great games of recent cricket history. It is not my intention to debate the relative merits of Tour cycling versus Test cricket, but rather to note that these great sporting moments took place in the two greatest cities of Europe, long time competitors, but nowadays more siblings than rivals: two cities that are slowly turning themselves into exemplars of modern democratic urbanism.
London and Paris have historically always been the most populous Europe cities — here, I exclude Moscow and Istanbul, both bigger by headcount, but not truly European in the same sense: they are border cities on the European periphery, which makes them important, but rather different from the cities that lie at the heart of this small continent — and scale matters for the quality urban life. Not just scale of course, for history and culture also make important contributors to the status of a city, which is why Shanghai will remain more important that Shenzhen. What sets London and Paris apart from the other capitals of Europe is not just their size, but also their role in European and global history, how this history has been memorialised and, consequently, how they have reinvented themselves as centres of post-imperial culture.
I live in London and visit Paris regularly: I like them both. I could imagine living happily in Paris – although I would need to improve my poor language skills – whereas most other European cities I am content to enjoy for a few days, or at most a couple of weeks. I find it hard to imagine spending a year or two living away from one of Europe’s twin capitals, without experiencing serious withdrawal symptoms from their scale and standing. I recognise that not all people feel this way: they like Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Milan or Lisbon precisely because they are smaller, more manageable, less overwhelming that London or Paris. And then, there are some people – apparently – who prefer like to live in the suburbs, or even the countryside: chacun son goût.
As well as great sporting events, Paris and London are host to many of the things that are central to my preferred lifestyle: art, food, literature, music, and an open public culture. Paris has much better historical art collections and public museums, but London has more adventurous contemporary commercial galleries. Restaurant food is of a consistently higher standard in Paris and good French wine is not too expensive there, but the global range, both for food and wine, is better in London. Both cities have great bookshops, orchestras, theatres, and performance spaces: I would guess that opera is better in Paris and jazz better in London; and while France is famous for taking its intellectuals more seriously than anywhere else, publishing in London is probably more diverse, not least because more of the world’s interesting books are written today in English rather than in French. Paris has better architecture, both its venerable old buildings and it chic new ones, but London’s cityscape is more varied and eccentric, and I think its parks and gardens are more interesting.
There was a time, twenty-five years ago, when I thought the centre of London was becoming smarter and more vibrant, while Paris seemed to be in slow decline. In recent years, Paris has caught up, and probably overtaken London in this regard. For both cities, hosting the Olympic Games has been a useful excuse to renovate and rejuvenate, with old buildings refurbished and new sports facilities developed. In both cities there has been a serious attempt to reduce car traffic, and to encourage more walking and cycling, and both have progressive mayors, committed to improving the environmental quality of urban life. My sense is that Paris has been more successful in this regard, and in the centre it now feels more of a pedestrian city than London, although London’s public transport network seems more modern and better integrated.
Both cities are full of people– residents and visitors – who have come from everywhere, but who are all trying to find a way of making themselves at home in the metropole. This diversity reflects their shared history as capitals of empire, major centres of global trade and finance, by means of which Europe temporarily dominated the world in military and economic terms. Those superpower years are long past for both France and England, but now Paris and London share the opportunity of creating something more complex, more valuable, and less transient than imperial power. For Paris and London are both cities today where the peoples of the world can meet each other on equal terms, and learn to live, work, and play together as neighbours.
There have been other cities in European history that have been diverse and successful – Amsterdam and Venice, for example – and there are major cities outside Europe today that share this opportunity for global diversity – Singapore and New York, for example – and what all these places have in common is that as they become increasingly successful at integrating large, diverse populations, on the basis of a shared urban identity, they become increasingly unlike the surrounding country where they are based: London is unlike England, and Paris is unlike France, just as Singapore is unlike Malaysia, and New York is unlike America.
For this reason, the more successful global cities become the more they tend to be disliked and disparaged by the neighbouring provincial populations who have chosen not to migrate to them. To put this another way, those who want to embrace the thrill and pace of modern life have always headed to the major cities, and those who crave slower, more traditional ways of living have always fled them. Paris and London remain the capitals of modernity, despite no longer being the biggest or richest cities in the world, because they are the most diverse and, at the same time, despite the significant variations in wealth that are found in all modern cities, they are both trying to become ‘cities of equals’.
What do I mean by cities of equals? I borrow the phrase from the title of a recent book, written by my good friend Jonathan Wolff, and his co-author Avner de-Shalit. As is appropriate for a book about equality of access, the electronic version published by Oxford University Press is free to download here. It is an interesting and an important book and I recommend it to you. Blending philosophical analysis with structured interviews, the authors put to the test their ideas about what matters to city dwellers with what these city dwellers say themselves about what matters. It is a sound, creative, dialogical approach to a complex problem, and it generates many good insights into how cities can be made into better places for all to live.
In the introduction, the authors make clear that by the phrase ‘city of equals’ they do not mean a city in which the gap between the rich and the poor is small, but rather, by being able to secure a sense of place to all its residents despite economic differences; a sense of place as a member of a city as a whole, and not simply within a very local area such as a very restricted neighbourhood. I like this concept, for a number of reasons, not least because it offers a challenge to city policy and decision makers that is different from that of national governments: it is about creating a urban environment in which all citizens have access to the places and services they need to live fulfilled lives, and that they can access those places and services without recourse to deference.
In my view, non-deferential shared access to spaces and services lies at the heart of modern democratic city life. The rich have always been able to access the best things in life and, in the past, mostly they have kept these things to themselves, families, and friends, using restrictive entry mechanisms to exclude all others. A modern democratic city opens up these goods to all: whether it is access to parks and museums, to be able enjoy music and performance in public spaces without having to pay, to play sports and celebrate the success of the national team, to travel across the city safely and in comfort at relatively low cost, to breathe clean air and to walk on pedestrianised streets alongside the river, and around the city’s most famous squares and monuments, and to be recognised and acknowledged by fellow citizens as having the same entitlement to enjoy these experiences as any other citizen. Only in Paris and London are the populations sufficiently large and diverse, and the resources of the city sufficiently attractive and important, properly to test the limits of this principle of non-deferential access to a wide array of public goods. What must be true of a city of equals is both that those places and experiences that matter are openly shared, and that this open access for all is accepted as a matter of civic pride.
Paris and London are both situated in nations that are generally tolerant of progress (albeit with a dose of suspicion) such that they will allow the character of their capital cities significantly to diverge from the character of the wider nation. Some public commentators who live outside the capital will moan, resent, and ridicule: but these critics are worried mostly, I think, because many of the features of the good life of the capital will slowly spread out from their metropolitan origins. For successful cities of equals are potentially the harbingers of a much wider movement – the creation of societies of equals – as the benevolent virus of non-deferential living slowly contaminates the wider world.