State powers and intra-state conflicts in the development of the Grand Paris Express station districts
This article, written by Antoine Gosnet, Ph.D. Student (Géographie-cités/EHESS), has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society for a special issue on megaprojects and their symbolic value for urban and regional economies edited by Robert Hassink, Dieter F. Kogler, Davide Ponzini and Xuefei Ren. It examines a megaproject through the lens of various layers of the State, each of which relies on State power in different ways to gain legitimacy for intervention in regional and local planning.
It aims to dissect the State’s power into different entities, reflecting the successive phases of rescaling that have taken place in France and the Paris City-Region since the 2010 announcement of the Grand Paris Express megaproject. First, it explores the State’s re-engagement in local planning across different scales, revealing competing urban visions. Then, it discusses the concept of intra-state conflict, where the State sometimes contradicts itself. Finally, it proposes a framework to understand the intra-metropolitan transition in districts transformed by the megaproject.
Studies in geography and urban studies most often approach the phenomenon of metropolization as a process that encompasses the entire metropolis. This article aims to propose a new articulation of the relationship between the local and the global in the study of urban production within a metropolitan context. The central hypothesis posits that some districts are more actively involved in metropolitan dynamics than others. By metropolitan dynamics, we refer to Allen Scott’s work on metropolitan development, which involves the coordination of supra-local actors to implement spatial planning policies, particularly those stemming from the introduction of metropolitan infrastructures.
Antoine Gosnet, A mega-rescaling-project: state powers and intra-state conflicts in the development of the Grand Paris Express station districts, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2025, rsaf007, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsaf007
