For a long time, what is, and what is not, Paris was defined by the 21-mile beltway that encircles it. Inside the Périphérique, as the road is known, was the romantic city of gilded bridges and ageless beauty that inspired the most famous line in the movies, Humphrey Bogart’s epitaph for love: “We’ll always have Paris.”
Beyond it, in the banlieue, or suburbs, home to many immigrants, stood dilapidated public housing. From time to time, as in 2005, riots erupted. The postal code 93, denoting the vast department of Seine-Saint-Denis north of the city, was synonymous to some with troubled dereliction, however reductive that stereotype became over time.
Forget all that. Greater Paris is born, reconfiguring the city. The Périph, a moat no longer, has steadily become porous. The east, long snubbed by the bourgeoisie of western Paris, has risen, turning the banlieue from Pantin to Romainville into cool, desirable areas. Tourists troop to the Louvre, but the action is no longer on the Seine River — it is on a 200-year-old canal, the Ourcq.
“In Pantin, I always feel I’m in the future, and in central Paris, I’m stuck in the past,” said Rémi Babinet, the founding chairman of the BETC advertising agency, which moved its headquarters from the city to Pantin in 2016. “Tourists pay a lot to see a Paris that never moves, but they are going to have to discover a different one that does.”
Mr. Babinet’s offices look out over the gently flowing waters of the Ourcq (pronounced “Ork”), which began life bringing drinking water to Paris and, not so long ago, flowed past a squalid industrial zone of factories for cigarettes, steel boiler tubes, toilets and mopeds.
“Stolen cars got dumped in the water,” said Laurence Lavillière, recalling her childhood. She was born in 1972 and has lived her entire life in Pantin. “The canal was a no man’s land of drugs and garbage.”
Cut to today’s leafy waterfront of biking trails, workout equipment, footpaths, hip bars and restaurants. The canal is broad and flows unfenced almost at the level of its banks, creating a liberating sense of liquid space. People fish for pike and perch.
This is another Seine-Saint-Denis, by no means born overnight, but now screaming that the time has come to retire, or least adjust, tired images and stereotypes of the banlieue, with their baggage of prejudice.
That was part of the idea behind the Greater Paris Metropolis, founded almost a decade ago by an act of Parliament. It groups the city with 130 surrounding districts, more than tripling the Paris population to over seven million. One of the aims was to break barriers, both ethnic and economic. Paris had to be more than a manicured museum preserved for the affluent beneath the Eiffel Tower and the Panthéon’s dome.
The project stalled. The Grand Paris Express, its heart, a $46.7 billion rail network connecting areas of the banlieue and the city, advanced fitfully. Only with the opening last year, in time for the Olympics, of its hub at the St.-Denis-Pleyel station was there a movement in people’s minds. The Olympics themselves, heavily concentrated in Seine-Saint-Denis, brought development, vitality, new housing and an enlarged view of Paris.
Suddenly the banlieue is buzzing. A show called “Banlieues Chéries,” or “Dearest Banlieues,” at the Museum of the History Immigration was the hit of the summer. Through installations, videos and paintings, it traced the cultural richness of the banlieue with the aim of shattering “reductive prisms.” A website called Enlarge Your Paris is thriving; its Greater Paris Guide is in its third edition.
Thaddaeus Ropac, a pioneer in Pantin, saw it coming. He opened his vast art gallery in a redbrick former boiler factory 13 years ago. He wanted to show the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz; there was no space in his Paris gallery in the Marais.
“The French were initially horrified,” he recalled. “My God! To come here at night was unthinkable. But I was sure that if we did it, we would get our audience.”
To stroll the banks of the Ourcq for 20 minutes from Pantin toward Paris is to grasp how seamlessly connected the city has become and how its center of gravity has shifted. The Périphérique feels like a noisy relic. Mr. Babinet predicts it will be gone within 25 years as the green economy transforms the city further.
The waterway ushers you into the Parc de la Villette in the 19th district of Paris. Abutting the large park is the Paris Philharmonic, opened a decade ago and designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, a 2,400-seat concert hall housed in a many-faceted silvery shell.
Traditional Paris groused at having to drag itself from the moneyed 16th district near the Bois de Boulogne to hear great classical music, but it slowly came around. Today, 1.5 million people attend the Philharmonic annually.
There are added perks. Climbing the Eiffel Tower is a little passé. The rooftop of the Philharmonic, known as the Belvédère, offers a panoramic view over the new Paris to the north of the Sacré-Coeur, the old Paris beside the tower itself and Pantin. It is a stirring change of perspective.
“What is the Philharmonic if not a way to create bridges and passageways toward new publics?” Olivier Mantei, its director, said in an interview. “Even architecturally, it is a hand extended across the ring road.”
For Mr. Mantei, central Paris is inert. It is suffocated. Its creativity is stilled. The city, he believes, is “moving its center toward Greater Paris, where there is space, diversity, innovation and air.”
In Pantin, I ran into Ayoud Houzali, whose family comes from the Comoros, and Aymane Laraqui, of Moroccan descent. Both live in subsidized housing daubed in graffiti and are in their final year of high school, studying science and technology.
The housing reflects the fact that social problems have not been eliminated. With more than 40 homicides last year, Seine-Saint-Denis still had the highest number in the Paris region.
But a different, more hopeful atmosphere now prevails. “I’m 17 and I’ve never experienced any racism,” Mr. Houzali said. “The image of Seine-Saint-Denis is totally out of date.”
And what of the future? “In tech, which we study, there are many opportunities,” Mr. Laraqui said.
Mixité, or social diversity, has been an obsession of Bertrand Kern, a Socialist who has been the mayor of Pantin for almost a quarter-century. Subsidized apartments make up about 41 percent of housing in this suburb of 61,000 inhabitants; 33 percent of apartments in any new construction must be low-cost social housing accessible to poorer families.
“I am a man of the left, I believe in diversity,” Mr. Kern said in an interview. “We do not want a ghetto of the wealthy in Pantin. You have to mix, the poor beside the rich, and every man and woman has to find a place. We have problems, of course, but it’s rare.”
Ms. Lavillière, the longtime Pantin resident, has seen a working-class suburb become a magnet for poor immigrants as industry collapsed. She now sees a whirlwind of gentrification, which has its downsides because it pushes out people who cannot afford rising prices, whatever the best efforts of local authorities. “We laugh at the chic Parisians who insist on organic vegetables and matcha teas, but everyone has to adapt,” she said.
Pantin is home to major offices of Hermès, Chanel and other iconic French brands more readily associated with the Rive Gauche. An immense project, called Les Grandes-Serres, or Great Greenhouses, will transform a disused factory on the banks of the Ourcq into a glass emporium of food, culture and artists’ studios, flanked by several acres of greenery.
“Our designers here feel they have their finger on the pulse of our times,” said Bernhardt Eichner, the director general of the Hermès Services Groupe. “That’s important.”
The pulse moves at various speeds. Frantz Leconte, a graphic artist, had walked for 40 minutes from his home in the 19th district of Paris to cast his line into the Ourcq. He explained that fishing was his passion, a form of meditation.
“When you fish you think of nothing and you find answers,” he said. “If you want to fish, be patient and persevere. It won’t come at once but when you catch the first one you’ll find it’s you who’ve been caught by the fish.”
In the same way, the affluent of western Paris who initially made their way with reluctance to the Philharmonic now find themselves hooked, “and they’re looking for apartments to buy in Pantin,” Mr. Mantei said.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
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