Paris: Introduction: Overview

With major European cities looking more and more alike (you’ll find the same hotels, chain stores and Starbucks from Berlin to Barcelona), Paris stands gloriously apart. It’s not that the city isn’t cosmopolitan—it is—but even though many Parisians speak some English these days, the city takes pride in being the capital of the French-speaking and Latin worlds, with a distinctively different worldview. To wit, France sees itself as offering a cultural, political and sociological alternative to the galloping, American-style globalization that has marked the beginning of this new millennium. And this explains why Paris, perhaps the most beautiful city anywhere, is more or less off-limits to overzealous developers—from the French perspective, earning a euro is just fine, but beauty is priceless.

Paris is far from being stuck in time. The stunning new Musée du Quai Branly, by architect Jean Nouvel, expresses the boom in contemporary design and architecture taking place in the French capital right now, and Paris remains an endlessly innovative city. Its “Paris Plage” project—every summer, the highway bordering the Seine is shut down (this year from July 19 through August 20) and turned into the world’s largest urban beach, complete with sand, showers, chaise lounges and palm trees—has been widely copied, and the first link in a sleek new system of tramways opened late last year.