..as Morissey put is so eloquently in the superb 'Years of Refusal'. I was fortunate enough to visit the city over the last few days with my family. No sense of recession here. The unrelenting beauty of Paris as an urban place is quite humbling, and for all other places a lesson. The quality of the place is not only a reflection of wealth, but it also clearly endemic to the sustainable urbanism and the maintenance of that wealth. How to even express it? Hundred's of year of looking after a precious place, looking after every detail, keep people living there. The showy stuff like the Eiffel Tower (read Guggenheim Bilbao) and the palaces are nothing without the background streets. Everything that we need to learn about urbanism already exists, and has been tried and tested...and its living. Of course sitting on the RER out to Disneyland there's many sides to Paris, and not everyone enjoys the privileges of living in the centre. btw. the people were lovely.
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