18

Interview with Pierre Veltz, economist, former director of the Mission du Grand Paris and former president of Paris-Saclay, sees the way in which the Grand Paris Express project was developed by then-Minister Christian Blanc as its own private project. He decided against cooperating with the Île-de-France region, preferring instead to enter into a dialog with the mayors. He takes stock of the development of the Paris-Saclay “Science and Technology Cluster” and defends the decision to build a new metro line, line 18, to connect the site. The concerns of ecologists about the future urbanization of the Saclay plateau appear to him to be completely unfounded, as the agricultural land is strongly protected. For him, the Metropole du Grand Paris (MGP) is “an union of immobility” that allows each mayor to keep control of their own house. The solution is to transfer the powers of the MGP to the Île-de-France region, with some twenty large inter-municipal cities with a population of between 4 and 500,000 as an intermediate level.