Square Feet: Ambitious Paris Project Takes Shape in the Suburbs

In response, the city government has begun an ambitious program of large-scale, mixed-use developments on the periphery. The goals are twofold: creating an engine for economic growth while preserving the Belle Époque Paris beloved by tens of millions of tourists; and integrating the prosperous city with struggling inner-ring suburbs, or banlieues.

Though France, and much of Europe, remains mired in economic malaise, one such development, the Clichy Batignolles project in northwest Paris, is gaining momentum this year after more than a decade of planning.

The first residents moved in last fall, the second phase of a much-loved and much-needed park is close to completion, an office complex that will be owned by the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer is seeking tenants, and site preparation is nearly done for a soaring courthouse designed by Renzo Piano’s studio that will be one of the tallest buildings in Paris.

Mr. Piano first made his mark in Paris with the radical Pompidou Center in the mid-1970s. He acknowledged that the courthouse and the Clichy Batignolles project were taking Paris in a different direction — but a necessary one, he argued in an interview at his Paris workshop.

“We are celebrating a shift in the history of the town,” he said. “We are bringing the fertilizing elements to the periphery. You are changing something, and changing something is not easy.”

By the numbers, the 133-acre project is impressive for any city: 12,700 projected jobs; 3,400 housing units, subsidized and market-rate; 1.5 million square feet of office space; 410,000 square feet of public facilities, including schools; 334,000 square feet of shops and services — and 90 courtrooms and offices to accommodate some 8,000 people a day in the 524-foot-tall courthouse.

Garbage and recyclables will be collected with a system of pneumatic tubes, sharply cutting emissions and odors. Buildings with “green” roofs with vegetation, slabs of photovoltaic cells and geothermal heating point to an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality.

The project will offer commuters and residents a range of transportation options, including two new Metro stations, an extension of the tramway that nearly circles the city, a regional rail station and a 600-space underground parking garage.

But Paris being Paris, the prospect of high-rise offices, glossy apartment blocks and a large influx of low-income housing has not been received with great enthusiasm.

Brigitte Kuster, the maire, or mayor, of the 17th Arrondissement, protested that the area already had a large amount of subsidized housing, said Hubert Jamault, her chief of staff. Ms. Kuster, he said, “is not against the construction of social housing, but she does not want all the difficulties to be concentrated in the same place.”

Now, he said, after a petition drive, appeals to the city council and “numerous” public meetings with the city, her concerns have largely been addressed.

The decision to allow buildings up to 50 meters tall (about 160 feet) “has been the subject of a broad dialogue with local residents,” said Anne Hidalgo, a deputy mayor of Paris and a champion of the project. (The courthouse is an exception.)

Ms. Hidalgo, a leading candidate for mayor in elections next year, said the height of the buildings would be in proportion to the park — similar to Central Park in New York — and would allow for innovative architecture, and views and light for inhabitants.

“I’m quite happy with the results,” Ms. Hidalgo said via e-mail, “which offer Paris a new neighborhood that is ecological, a pleasant place to live, innovative in all ways, very Parisian, and resolutely turned toward the future.”

Clichy Batignolles, named for the adjoining neighborhoods, was first planned in 2001 under Mayor Bertrand Delanoë of Paris and Ms. Hidalgo, said Didier Bailly, director general of Paris Batignolles Aménagement, the corporation formed to oversee much of the project.

In the subsequent years, transportation, housing and office components were added, and — reminiscent of the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan — the site became a centerpiece of Paris’s bid for the 2012 Olympics, which were captured by London.

By 2008, Mr. Bailly said, all the components of the project were in place with the deal to build the courthouse. That year, though, the persistent recession that the French call “la crise” struck.

“The crisis means that investors are extremely demanding,” Mr. Bailly said. “They have means, but they’re very attentive to how it’s invested; they want to ensure the safety of their investment.”

Some developers have delayed building in Clichy Batignolles, hoping that the market will improve. No large commercial tenants have yet committed to the project.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

Because of an editing error, a summary with an earlier version of this article misstated the size of the Clichy Batignolles project in northwest Paris. It is 133 acres, not 154.

On the Road: Lean Airlines in Poor Shape to Handle Passenger Backlog

Besides the immediate effects of the storm, the airlines have cut so much that they have little ability to handle any extra strain. Fleets have been pared; employees laid off. In a system now flying with more than 80 percent of seats full, there’s no slack to handle a crush of desperate passengers looking to reschedule flights knocked off the board by a big storm.

“Right now we’re looking at tens of thousands of business travelers whose trips were interrupted, and who are stuck,” said Joseph Bates, the vice president for research at the Global Business Travel Association. The Eastern seaboard is “the busiest area of the United States in terms of business travel, and it’s essentially going to be shut down for two days.”

Expect large numbers of additional flight cancellations this week. The 7,300-plus cancellations counted Monday afternoon by the flight tracking service Flightstats.com represented about a quarter of the 27,000 scheduled commercial flights on a typical weekday in the United States. As thousands of scrubbed flights pile up through the week, the likelihood for air travel chaos is high.

Basically, the best advice is this: Stay home this week. If you’re already en route and stranded, or if you have a ticket for air travel in the near future, consult airlines for the current storm-travel waiver policies. But good luck with that, because airlines long ago thinned staff at their call centers, and the Web sites were providing scant information on Monday, at least.

Generally, the airlines are waiving penalty fees, which are usually $150, for passengers who rebook after canceling a so-called nonrefundable reservation, or having one canceled. But the restrictions are tight.

“I’m hearing from business travelers who said they’re being rebooked, only to find that the rebooked flight is also canceled,” said Joe Brancatelli, the publisher of the subscription business travel site Joesentme.com.

“These are ridiculous travel waiver policies that are trying to force you into rebooking through a very narrow window,” he said.

Some airlines seemed to project a rather casual attitude about the crisis on their Web sites, it seemed to me. Even as scheduled flights were being canceled wholesale, the United Airlines advisory, for example, provided a list of what it referred to as “cities that may experience flight delays due to weather conditions.”

United’s policy on rebooking was typical. The change penalty and any extra charge for higher fares is waived, provided a passenger rebooks and begins the new trip by Nov. 7. On Delta, new travel has to be commenced by Sunday.

For the airlines themselves, one chief concern is keeping airplanes and crews out of the storm and in place to be rescheduled. “They saw this coming and knew it was going to be nasty, and they didn’t want the hardware on the ground,” said G. Bruce Hedlund, a recently retired American Airlines captain.

Once the storm abates, airlines will need to reposition planes and crews. “When the skies turn blue again, that doesn’t mean everything’s immediately fine. It takes another couple of days to get the crews and the jets to where they belong and bring the system back,” Mr. Hedlund said.

There’s also more dependence on part-time employees who can be scheduled ad hoc, meaning it’s going to be harder to get the system back quickly. “Now the computer says, ‘I don’t need you for eight hours; I need you at the peak,’ so it’s a part-time job tailoring the schedule for demand, and that adds complications,” he said.

In Orlando, Fla., the annual convention of the National Business Aviation Association, which represents the private jet industry, was getting under way on Monday, with questions on how many of the 25,000 people expected would actually get there.

“We haven’t heard from hotels that people are dropping reservations,” said Dan Hubbard, a spokesman for the group.

As the storm loomed, the Global Business Travel Association offered statistics extrapolated from past disruptions and found that in a major hurricane of one to two days’ duration on the East Coast, the total loss in business travel spending would be about $684 million, and 580,000 business trips would be disrupted.

Mr. Hedlund, the retired American Airlines captain, said that the math was simple as the storm raged and waned. “There are not any extra airplanes. There aren’t any extra crews. So you just wait till the rumbles die down, and the system recovers almost of its own natural accord.”