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This article considers the site and space of Les Halles as an ongoing intellectualfascination. It specifically looks at how architects have historically approachedLes Halles as a “site of modernity” and puts into context the most recent renovationand the architectural competition to design Les Halles in 2004-2005.It will consider the projects and their viability from a cultural perspective andopen the question of the site and the city's future form.

Until 1969, when Paris's wholesale food markets were moved to the Parisiansuburb of Rungis, Les Halles, the market district in the center of Paris, fedmuch of the city's urban population. Les Halles was not simply a place wherefood was bought and sold, but also a highly visible and symbolically chargednode of communication between the countryside, the state, and the bodies ofParisian citizens. Due to its centrality and visibility, Les Halles came underenormous pressure to physically symbolize the state's relationship to the “market.”In turn, the architecture of the markets at Les Halles came to stand in forthe powers of the state to organize a flow of goods from farm to body. Fromthe 1763 construction of the Halle au blé, to the 1851 ground-breaking on VictorBaltard's iron and glass market pavilions, to the construction of the CentrePompidou and the Forum des Halles in the 1970s and 1980s, the markets atLes Halles were regularly redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate and/or produceshifting notions of architectural, social, and financial order.

While Mayor Bertrand Delanoë had omitted the renovation of Les Halles in hisplans for the city in his 2001 inaugural address, in 2002, at the urging of theRATP and Espace Expansion, he decided to create a working group to undertakethis project during his tenure. Having made citizen participation a newgoal for local government, he also announced that the project would beundertaken with Parisians, especially local associations. The first part of thisarticle emphasizes the different postures that elected politicians, engineers,and experts have adopted over the course of forty years vis-à-vis the questionof citizen participation in urban planning. The second part explores the decision-making process for the Les Halles renovation over the last four years; itconsiders the issues and difficulties linked to the implementation of participatoryplans incorporating residents--whether they are members of localgroups or not--in complex urban planning projects.

During the Fordist period, the state transformed the historic site of Les Halles,in the heart of Paris, into the agglomeration's chief mass transit gateway.Efforts to make the site into a veritable tool of social, cultural, and economicmetropolitan development are struggling because of governmental modalitiesthat remain very marked by centralism. A majority of citizens, notably thoseliving in suburban Paris, actively stake a claim to this metropolitan dimensionand to the rich possibilities of this tool. The article principally analyzes the territorializingpractices of suburban youths, whose multiple subjectivities arestill poorly integrated into the site. Les Halles thus reveals the question of thecorrespondence of these establishing metropolitan practices to the reality ofthe centralized institutions around Paris intramuros.