User:ThePromenader/Paris 2014bis

Toponymy

 * See Wiktionary for the name of Paris in various languages other than English and French.

The name "Paris" is derived from its early inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. The city's inhabitants are known in English as "Parisians" and in French as Parisiens. Paris has also been called Panam(e) in French slang since the late 19th century, and French non-Parisians sometimes pejoratively refer to Parisians as Parigots.

Paris is often referred to as "The City of Light" ("La Ville-Lumière"), first because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment, and more literally because Paris was one of the first European cities to adopt gas street lighting: by the 1860s, Paris' streets and boulevards were illuminated by fifty-six thousand gas lamps.

Origins
The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the mid-third century BCE. One of the area's major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine river on the île de la Cité; this meeting place  of land and water trade routes gradually became a town and an important trading center. The Parisii traded with many river towns as far away as Spain, and minted their own coins for that purpose.

The Romans conquered the Paris basin in 52 BCE and, after making the island a garrison camp, began extending their settlement more permanently to Paris' left bank. Originally called Lutetia (more fully, Lutetia Parisiorum, "Lutetia of the Parisii"), the Gallo-Roman town became a prosperous city with a forum, baths, temples, theatres, and an amphitheatre. The city was known simply as Parisius by the end of the Roman Empire.

Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century CE by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris. Legend has it that, after refusing to renounce his faith, he was beheaded on the hill known today as Montmartre, giving it its "martyr hill" (Mons Martyrum) name. After his execution, he supposedly carried his head to a place north of the city: his burial place there became an important religious shrine, and its later Basilica of Saint-Denis became the burial place of French royalty. Paris' patron saint, Sainte-Genevieve, entered city legend after the 5th-century collapse of the Roman empire: after convincing Parisians not to abandon the town at word of the 451 CE advance of Attila the Hun (who bypassed Paris and attacked Orléans), she brought morale and provisions during the ten-year siege of the city from 461 by the Salian Frank Childeric I. Childeric's son, Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made Paris his capital from 508.

Paris became France's largest and most prosperous city under the Capetian dynasty that began with the 987 election of Hugh Capet, then Duke of Paris, as king of France.

Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Paris had become the political, economic, religious, and cultural capital of France by the end of the 12th century. Its royal palace was on the Île de la Cité, near the Notre-Dame cathedral that had been under construction since 1163. The Left Bank was dedicated to scholarly activities, where the University of Paris, a student-teacher corporation created as a theology division of the Notre-Dame cathedral school, taught canon law, medicine and the arts. The Right Bank, former marshlands that had been progressively filled in from the 10th century, became the centre of commerce and finance, and trade there was dominated by the powerful les marchands de l’eau river merchants' corporation. Between 1190 and 1202, Philip Augustus built the massive fortress du Louvre, rebuilt Paris' only two solid bridges, began paving Paris' main thoroughfares, and began the construction of a fortified wall around the city.

The city was under Burgundian and English rule between 1356 and 1436 during the Hundred Years' War, and was a stronghold of the Catholic league during the French Wars of Religion a century later; the latter conflict culminated in the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and ended when protestant Henri IV converted to Catholicism to enter the capital as King in 1594. Henry IV did much for the capital: he built its Pont Neuf, Paris' first bridge to be adorned with sidewalks and unadorned by buildings, enlarged the Louvre palace, and created Paris' first residential square, the Place Royale, today's place des Vosges.

In the 17th century, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, was determined to make Paris the most beautiful city in Europe. He built five new bridges, a new chapel for the College of Sorbonne, and his own palace, the Palais Cardinal, today's Palais-Royal. The restlessness of Paris' more popular classes motivated Louis XIV to move his court and France's capital to Versailles in 1682, but the city saw an unprecedented flourishing of the arts and sciences: the Comédie-Française, the Academy of Painting, and the French Academy of Sciences were founded in this period. Louis XIV also demolished Paris' unneeded fortifications to make place for tree-lined Grands Boulevards, built the Collège des Quatre-Nations, created the Place Vendôme and the Place des Victoires, and began construction of the Les Invalides military hospital.

18th century and the French Revolution
By the early 18th century Paris was the financial capital of continental Europe, had become the primary European centre of book publishing, and was reknown for its fashion, fine furniture and luxury goods. A constant, largely working-class migration increased Paris' population from 400,000 to 600,000 between 1640 and 1789: the upper classes settled Paris' western quarters around the newly-constructed Champs-Élysées and Étoile, while the most of the migrants settled the increasingly crowded eastern Faubourg Saint-Antoine quarter. Paris' class division probably had much to do with the philosophical explosion that was the Age of Enlightenment: coffeehouses became popular places for those of all classes to exchange and discuss ideas and grievances.

Dissent with the crown régime became the French Revolution in the summer of 1789. On the 14th of July, after seizing guns from the Invalides arsenal, a mob stormed and overtook Paris' symbol of royal oppression, the Bastille fortress and prison. The astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly became Paris' first mayor in the Hôtel de Ville the next day, elected by Paris' first-ever city council.

By 1793 the revolution had turned into the Reign of Terror, and the King, Queen, and Paris' Mayor had fallen to the guillotine along with two and a half thousand other Parisians. Everything under noble and ecclesiastic title became national property, and many Paris churches were closed, sold or demolished. Paris was ruled by a succession of revolutionary factions until Napoléon Bonaparte seized power as First Consul on the 9th of November 1799.

The First to Second Empires, the Paris Commune
Paris' population had dropped by 100,000 during the Revolution, but it resurged by 160,000 between 1799 and 1815 to total 660,000. One of Napoleon Bonaparte's first acts after gaining power was to abolish Paris' short-lived municipal government and replace it by a prefect governing the Paris-and-suburb encompassing Seine department. In addition to erecting monuments to his own military glory (namely the Arc de Triomphe), he did much to improve unsanitary capital conditions: the Canal de l'Ourcq brought clean water to Paris and fed new fountains, Paris' inner-city cemeteries were condemned and moved to three new suburban cemeteries (namely Père Lachaise), and inner-city slaughterhouses were moved to the suburbs as well. The First Empire also gave the city its first metal bridge, the Pont des Arts.

Paris' bridges, streets and squares regained their pre-revolution names during the Restoration which ended with the July Revolution of 1830 commemorated by the July Column on Place de la Bastille. The first Paris-Saint-Cloud railway line to Paris opened in 1837: the development of a rail network stretching from Paris to all regions of France would set off a new period of massive migration. Crown rule came to an end when the 'citizen-king' Louis-Philippe was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1848.

Napoleon III's rise to power through a coup d'état in 1852 marked the beginning of the Second Empire. His newly appointed Seine prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, is largely responsible for the image Paris has today: in a massive renovation that destroyed entire quarters, he replaced Paris' narrow streets with wide new boulevards, created three new parks, sculpted the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, renovated its central market, and added a new Opera house. Paris also owes its present size to this era: in 1860 its limits were extended to its then fortifications military wall, and the communes within became eight new city arrondissements.

At the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) that ended the Second Empire, Paris was a city under siege: after months of blockade, hunger, and constant bombardment, it surrendered on the 28th January 1871. Many Parisians were against capitulation, and organised a Paris Commune uprising that overthrew the armistice-negotiating transitional government on the 28th of March. The army and government, after regrouping in Versailles, returned two months later to reclaim Paris in a "Bloody Week" that remains one of the darker periods in Paris' history.

Paris international expositions did much to revive its image: the 1889 Universal Exposition, marking the centennial of the French Revolution, brought the Eiffel Tower; the even more successful 1900 Universal Exposition gave Paris the Pont Alexandre III, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais and its first Paris Métro line. The international renown made Paris a laboratory of artistic creation: Naturalism (Emile Zola), Symbolism (Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine), and Impressionism in art (Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir) were forms of artistic expression born in Paris in the late 19th century.

20th century
The Belle Époque artistic tradition continued through Paris' early 20th-century with Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse; Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art were popular then, and authors such as Marcel Proust were exploring new approaches to literature. The First World War came no closer to Paris than the First Battle of the Marne (and 600-1000 Paris taxis transported six thousand soldiers to the front lines there), but the city was bombed by Zeppelins and shelled by German long-range guns. The entre-deux-guerres Années Folles were just as artisticly productive with the arrival of Ernest Hemingway, Igor Stravinsky, Josephine Baker and the surrealist Salvador Dalí.

German forces occupied Paris from the 14th of June 1940, ending its direct involvement in World War II. The 'final solution' was extended there when, between the 16–17 July 1942, under Nazi orders, French police and gendarmes arrested 12,884 Jews, and confined them for five days at the Vel d'Hiv (Vélodrome d'Hiver) before shipping them by rail to Auschwitz. Word of the arrival of the French 2nd Armored Division and the US 4th Infantry Division inspired a French Resistance and Police uprising against the Nazis from the 19th August of 1944, and the city was liberated on the 25th. The General Charles de Gaulle led a victory parade down the Champs Élysées the next day. Paris became a front of the ongoing Algerian War for independence from 1961: there were bombings and and assassinations by both pro and anti Algerian independence factions, and violent confrontations between the police and demonstrators in October that year resulted in at least forty persons killed. During the May 1968 anti-capitalist social uprisings, demonstrations turned to riots when students occupied the Sorbonne University and barricaded the Latin Quarter, and the movement grew into a two-week country-crippling general strike.

Two still-controversial projects were completed in 1973: with its 57 stories and 210 metres, Paris' only 'real' skyscraper, the Tour Maine Montparnasse, and the city-encircling Périphérique expressway that is seen even today as a primary obstacle against Paris-suburb integration. In 1975 the National Assembly decided to make Paris a commune like any other in France: on the 25th of March 1977, Jacques Chirac became the first elected Mayor of Paris since 1793. Paris' modernisation efforts did little to remedy its saturation: rising property costs pushed middle-class families to its suburbs, and its population continued its slow decline.

Every post-war Fifth French Republic President seems to have left his own monument in Paris: President Georges Pompidou started the Centre Georges Pompidou (1977), Valéry Giscard d'Estaing transformed the former Paris-Orléans railway station into the Musée d'Orsay (1986). President François Mitterrand, in power for fourteen years, left the most marks of any modern French leader: he ordered the Opéra Bastille (1985-1989), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1996), the Arche de la Défense (1985-1989), and the Louvre museum with its Pyramid and underground mall (1983-1989).

21st century
Paris became a younger city from the early 21st century: the high fecundity of its rising younger population inspired the first city population increase since the 1920's, rising to 2.25 million in 2011.

Bertrand Delanoë became the first socialist mayor of Paris in March 2001, and one of his goals was to make Paris a 'greener' city: he introduced the Vélib' automated bicycle-rental system to inspire local car-commuters to change their ways, and transformed a section of left bank riverside expressway into an urban promenade and park, the Promenade des Berges de la Seine, inaugurated in June 2013.

Paris' persistently unremidied disconnect with its suburbs inspired President Nicolas Sarkozy to launch the Grand Paris project in 2007: the Greater Paris Metropolis, an inter-community program covering Paris and its closest departments, is scheduled for creation on January 1, 2016. Also connected with this initiative is the Grand Paris Express, or 205 kilometres of automated metro lines interconnecting Grand Paris and its airports and TGV stations, at an estimated cost of 35 billion Euros. The system is scheduled to be completed by 2030.

On 5 April 2014, Anne Hidalgo, a socialist, was elected the first woman mayor of Paris.

City government


Except for a few brief periods through its long history, Paris was governed directly by representatives of the King, Emperor, or President, and didn't gain municipal autonomy until 1974. The first modern elected Mayor of Paris was Jacques Chirac, elected 20 March 1977.

Electing the Mayor of Paris is a complicated process. Parisians only vote for their own arrondissement council, and the number of council members in each depend on their arrondissement population: its least-populated arrondissements (1st through 9th) have ten sitting members, and its most-populated 15th arrondissement has thirty-six; Paris has 364 conseillers d'arrondissement in total. The elected arrondissement council members in turn designate one or a few of their own (a number also depending on arrondissement population) to represent them in the 163-seat Conseil de Paris (Paris city council), and the city council designates the Mayor. Around a week after the city Mayor is elected, each arrondissement council selects their own arrondissement mayor. Unlike other French communes, Paris' city Council plays a largely passive role in city governance; they meet only once a month.

The 2013 Paris city budget was 7,6 billion Euros, of which 5.4 billion went for city administration, while 2.2 billion Euros went for investment. The largest part of the budget (38 percent) went for public housing and urbanism projects; 15 percent for roads and transport;  8 percent for schools (which are mostly financed by the state budget); 5 percent for parks and gardens; and 4 percent for culture. The main source of income for the city is direct taxes (35 percent), supplemented by a 13 percent real estate tax; 19 percent of the budget comes in a transfer from the national government.

The number of city employees, or agents, grew from 40,000 in 2000 to 73,000 in 2013. The city debt grew from 1.6 billion Euros in 2000 to 3.1 billion in 2012, with a debt of 3.65 billion Euros expected for 2014. As a result of the growing debt, the bond rating of the city was lowered from AAA to AA+ in both 2012 and 2013. In September 2014, Mayor Hidalgo announced that the city would have budget shortfall of 400 million Euros, largely because of a cut in support from the national government.

Architecture
Most French rulers since the Middle ages made a point of leaving their mark on a city that, contrary to many other of the world's capitals, has never been destroyed by catastrophe or war. In modernising its infrastructure through the centuries, Paris has preserved even its earliest history in its street map.

Before the Middle ages, the city was composed around several islands and sandbanks in a bend of the Seine. Three remain today: the île Saint-Louis, the île de la Cité and the artificial île aux Cygnes. Modern Paris owes much to its late 19th century Second Empire remodelling by the Baron Haussmann: many of modern Paris's busiest streets, avenues and boulevards today are a result of that city renovation. Paris also owes its style to its aligned street-fronts, building-unique upper-level stone ornamentation, aligned top-floor balconies, and its tree-lined boulevards. The high residential population of its city centre makes it much different from most other western global cities.

Paris's urbanism laws have been under strict control since the early 17th century, particularly where streetfront alignment, building height and building distribution is concerned. In recent developments, a 1974-2010 building height limitation of 37 m was raised to 50 m in central areas and 180 m in some of Paris's peripheral quarters, yet for some of Paris's more central quarters, even older building-height laws still remain in effect. The 210 m Montparnasse tower was both Paris and France's tallest building until 1973, but this record has been held by the La Défense quarter Tour First tower in Courbevoie since its 2011 construction. Skyscrapers are appearing in many of Paris's closest suburbs, particularly in La Défense where there are projects to build towers between 265 m and 323 m high.

Churches are the oldest intact buildings in the city, and show high Gothic architecture at its best — Notre Dame cathedral and the Sainte-Chapelle are two of the most striking buildings in the city. The latter half of the 19th-century was an era of architectural inspiration, with buildings such as the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, built between 1875 and 1919 in a neo-Byzantine design. Paris's most famous architectural piece, the Eiffel Tower, was built as a temporary exhibit for the 1889 World Fair and remains an enduring symbol of the capital with its iconic structure and position, towering over much of the city.

Housing
Paris is the 8th most expensive city in the world for luxury housing: 12105 $/m2 in 2007 (with London at the most expensive with 36800 $/m2). According to a 2012 study for the La Tribune newspaper, the most expensive street is the quai des Orfèvres in Paris's 6th, with an average price of 20665 $/m2, against 3900 $/m2 for the 18th arrondissement rue Pajol.

The total number of residences in the City of Paris in 2011 was 1,356,074, up from a former high of 1,334,815 in 2006. Among these, 1,165,541 (85,9%) were main residences, 91,835 (6,8%) were secondary residences, and the remaining 7.3% were empty (down from 9,2% in 2006).

Paris's urban tissue began to fill and overflow its 1860 limits from around the 1920s, and because of its density, it has seen few modern constructions since then. Sixty-two percent of its buildings date from 1949 and before, 20% were built between 1949 and 1974, and only 18% of the buildings remaining were built after that date.

Two-thirds of Paris's 1.3 million residences are studio and two-room apartments. Paris averages 1.9 residents per residence, a number that has remained constant since the 1980s, but it is much less than the Île-de-France's 2.33 person-per-residence average. Only 33% of principal-residence Parisians own their habitation (against 47% for the entire Île-de-France): the major part of Paris's population is a rent-paying one.

Social housing represents a little more than 17% of Paris's total residences, but these are rather unevenly distributed throughout the capital: the vast majority of these are concentrated in a crescent formed by Paris's south-western to northern periphery arrondissements.

Urban sociology
The continued rise of Paris' property values explains the gradual replacement of its lower-to-middle classes by a new class of more fortuned inhabitants, a gentrification trend shared by many of the world's other global cities like London or New York. This urban evolution gave the popular (yet largely undocumented) term "bobos" ("bourgeois-bohème") a negative ring when it became common for Parisians to it to describe the richer newcomers, and it was concretised in the social mutation of until-recently working-class quarters like the 10th arrondissement or Paris closest suburban communes like Montreuil.

In a list of France's cities with a population over 20,000, Paris ranks 12th its per-capita number of inhabitants paying the Solidarity tax on wealth, or 34.5 taxed households for every 1,000 inhabitants, and Paris' 16th arrondissement leads with its 17,356 inhabitants paying this tax. Seventy-three thousand three hundred and sixty-two taxed households declared a net worth of €1,961,667 in 2006. With an average €27,400 per consumer household in 2001, Parisian homes are the most well-off in France. France's next-richest departments, the Hauts-de-Seine, Yvelines, Essonne and the Val-de-Marne, are Paris' closest neighbours, and show the concentration of high-qualification professions in the Île-de-France.

But if the above makes Paris seem a "bourgeois" city, its social makeup is actually quite varied. According to the purchasing power parity index, the vast majority of individual Parisian incomes are much below the Paris average, as most of its wealth is held by its top few percent. The overall Parisian cost of living, especially in housing, is particularly high, and certain standard commodities are much more expensive in Paris than in the rest of France.

The traditional Parisian social divide is between the wealthy western quarters and those in its north and east; this social makeup extends into its nearest suburbs. In the early 2000s, 40% of Paris' lowest income households were in the 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements. 32.6% of Parisian families born in countries outside the European Union live below the poverty level. A few quarters, like the Goutte d'Or, accumulate all the social ills: it has the highest rate of academic failure, highest unemployment and worst school health record.

While Paris has some of the richest neighborhoods in France, it also has some of the poorest, mostly on the eastern side of the city. In 2012, 14 percent of households in the city earned less than 977 Euros per month, the official poverty line. Twenty-five percent of residents in the 19th arrondissement lived below the poverty line; 24 percent in the 18th, 22 percent in the 20th; 18 percent in the 10th. In the city's wealthiest neighborhood, the 7th arrondissement, seven percent lived below the poverty line; 8 percent in the 6th arrondissement; and 9 percent in the 16th arrondissement.

In 2012 the Paris agglomeration (urban area) counted 28,800 persons without a fixed residence, an increase of 84 percent since 2001; it represents 43 percent of the homeless in all of France. Forty-one percent were women, and twenty-nine percent were accompanied by children. Fifty-six percent of the homeless were born outside of France, the largest number coming from Africa and Eastern Europe.

Paris and its suburbs
Aside from the 20th century addition of the Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes and Paris heliport, Paris' administrative limits have remained unchanged since 1860. The destruction of the capital's obsolete military wall in 1920 inspired visions of a "Greater Paris", but political focus turned to its parent departments and region instead.

The Seine département had been governing Paris and its suburbs since its creation in 1790, but the rising suburban population had made it difficult to govern as a unique entity. This problem was 'resolved' when its parent "districte de la Région Parisienne" (Paris region) was reorganised into several new departments from 1968: Paris became a department in itself, and the administration of its suburbs was divided between the three departments surrounding it. The Paris region was renamed "Île-de-France" in 1977, but the "Paris region" name is still commonly used today.

Paris' disconnect with its suburbs, its lack of suburban transportation in particular, became all too apparent with the Paris agglomeration's growth. Paul Delouvrier promised to resolve the Paris-suburbs mésentente when he became head of the Paris region in 1961: two of his most ambitious projects for the Region were the construction of five suburban villes nouvelles ("new cities") and the RER commuter train network. Many other suburban residential districts (grands ensembles) were built between the 1960s and 1970s to provide a low-cost solution for a rapidly expanding population: these districts were socially mixed at first, but few residents actually owned their homes (the growing economy made these accessible to the middle classes only from the 1970s). Their poor construction quality and their haphazard insertion into existing urban growth contributed to their desertion by those able to move elsewhere and their repopulation by those with more limited possibilities.

These areas, "sensitive quarters", are in northern and eastern Paris, namely around its Goutte d'Or and Belleville neighbourhoods. To the north of the city they are grouped mainly in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, and to a lesser extreme to the east in the Val-d'Oise department. Other difficult areas are located in the Seine valley, in Évry et Corbeil-Essonnes (Essonne), in Mureaux, Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines), and scattered among social housing districts created by Delouvrier's 1961 "ville nouvelle" political initiative.

The Paris agglomeration's urban sociology is basically that of 19th century Paris: its fortuned classes are situated in its west and and south-west, and its middle-to-lower classes are in its north and east. The remaining areas are mostly middle-class citizenry with islands of fortuned populations due to reasons of historical importance, namely Saint-Maur-des-Fossés to the east and Enghien-les-Bains to the north of Paris.



Demography


Paris' density is one of the highest of any city in the developed world. The city population was 2,249,975 in January of 2011, and its metropolitan area population was 12,292,895 the same year. Like many other global cities, Parisian population main indicators are a high average income, relatively young median age, high proportion of international migrants and high economic inequalities.

Population evolution
Paris' population reached its highest to date shortly after World War I with nearly 3 million inhabitants, then decreased for the rest of the 20th century, with its sharpest decline between the 1960s and 1970s when it dropped from 2.8 to 2.2 million. It began to rise again with an increase of 125,000 inhabitants between 1999 and 2011 despite persistent negative net migration and a fertility rate well below 2, and continues to rise through the early 21st century. Much of this population growth is due to Paris' high proportion of people in the high-fecundity 18-40 age bracket.

Paris' suburban population, on the other hand, has been steadily increasing since the 1870's, and gained almost a million inhabitants between 1999 and 2011. The Paris region's 2012 fertility rate is above 2 children per woman.

Paris' population density, excluding the outlying woodland parks of Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, was 25864 PD/sqkm at the 2011 census, comparable to some Asian megapolises and the New York City's Manhattan island. Its overall population density was 21347 PD/sqkm, making it the fifth-most-densely populated commune in France after its direct-neigbour Levallois-Perret, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Vincennes, Saint-Mandé, and Montrouge communes. Paris' most sparsely populated quarters are the central-to-western office and administrative districts, and its densest populations are in its north and east: in 2011, the 11th arrondissement had a density of 42138 PD/sqkm, and some of its eastern quarters had densities close to 100000 PD/sqkm.

Migration
The Paris region is one of the most multi-cultural in Europe: at the 2011 census, 23.1% of its total population was born outside of Metropolitan France, continuing an upward trend from 22.2% in 2006 and 19.7% in 1999.

About half of the Paris region population was born elsewhere. About one third of recent foreign arrivals to Metropolitan France settle in the Paris Region, and about a third of these settle in Paris itself. Twenty percent of Parisians are first-generation immigrants, and 40% of Parisian children have at least one immigrant parent. Recent foreign immigrants tend to be more diverse in terms of qualification: many are totally unqualified for any trade, while many have tertiary education.

Although the international immigration rate is positive, population influx from the rest of France is negative. The trends are heavily age-related: most new arrivals to the city are in the 18-30 age bracket, while many retirees leave for the southern and western regions of France.

Economy
The economy of Paris stretches well beyond its administrative limits, as many of its manufacturing and service industries are in its closest suburbs. While economic figures are collected in the Paris region (Île-de-France) and its eight départements, employment numbers are expressed within Paris, the Paris agglomeration and the Paris aire urbaine (an area similar to the North American metropolitan area).

The Paris Region is France's premier centre of economic activity, with a 2012 GDP of €612 billion (US$760 billion). In 2011, its GDP ranked second among the regions of Europe and its per-capita GDP was the 4th highest in Europe. While the Paris region's population accounted for 18.8 percent of metropolitan France's in 2011, the Paris region GDP accounted for 31.0 per cent of metropolitan France's. It hosts the world headquarters of twenty-nine Fortune Global 500 companies.

The Parisian economy has been gradually shifting towards high-value-added service industries (finance, IT services, etc.) and high-tech manufacturing (electronics, optics, aerospace, etc.). In the 2013 European Green City Index, Paris was listed the tenth most "green" city of the largest thirty cities in Europe. The Paris region's most intense economic activity through the central Hauts-de-Seine département and suburban La Défense business district places Paris's economic centre to the west of the city, in a triangle between the Opéra Garnier, La Défense and the Val de Seine. While the Paris economy is dominated by services, and employment in manufacturing sector has declined sharply, the region remains an important manufacturing center, particularly for aeronautics, automobiles, and "eco" industries.

Employment
According to the 2011 census, 59.0% of the Paris metropolitan area workforce is in commerce, transportation, and market services: 26.8% worked in non-market services (public administration, education, human health and social work activities); 8.6% worked in manufacturing, mining, and utilities; 5.3% worked in construction; 0.3% worked in agriculture.

The majority of Paris' salaried employees fill 370,000 businesses services jobs, concentrated in the north-western 8th, 16th and 17th arrondissements. Paris' financial service companies are concentrated in the central-western 8th and 9th arrondissement banking and insurance district. Paris' department store district in the 1st, 6th, 8th and 9th arrondissements employ ten percent of mostly female Paris workers, with one hundred thousand of these registered in the retail trade. Fourteen percent of Parisians work in hotels and restaurants and other services to individuals. Nineteen percent of Paris employees work for the State in either in administration or education. The majority of Paris' healthcare and social workers work at the hospitals and social housing concentrated in the peripheral 13th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 20th arrondissements. Outside Paris, the western Hauts-de-Seine department La Défense district specialising in finance, insurance and scientific research district, employs 144,600, and the north-eastern Seine-Saint-Denis audiovisual sector has 200 media firms and ten major film studios.

Paris' manufacturing is centred in its suburbs: the city itself has only 75,000 manufacturing workers, with most of these in the textile, clothing, leather goods and shoe trades. Paris region manufacturing specialises in transportation, mainly automobiles, aircraft and trains, but this is in a sharp decline: Paris proper manufacturing jobs dropped by 64% between 1990 and 2010, and the Paris region lost 48% over the same period. Most of this is due to companies relocating outside the Paris region. The Paris region's 800 aerospace companies employed 100,000. Four hundred automobile industry companies employ another 100,000 workers: many of these are centred in the Yvelines department around the Renault and PSA-Citroen plants (this department alone employs 33,000 ), but the industry as a whole suffered a major loss with the 2014 closing of a major Aulnay-sous-Bois Citroen assembly plant.

The southern Essone department specialises in science and technology, and the south-eastern Val-de-Marne, with its wholesale Rungis food market, specialises in food processing and beverages. The Paris region's manufacturing decline is quickly being replaced by eco-industries: these employ about one hundred thousand Paris region workers. In 2011, while only 56,927 construction workers worked in Paris itself, its metropolitan area employs 246,639, in an activity centred largely around the Seine-Saint-Denis (41,378) and Hauts-de-Seine (37,303) departments and the new business-park centres appearing there. According to the Paris Tourism board, 18.4% of Paris' salaried jobs are affected by (if not directly related to) tourism. Paris receives around 28 million tourists per year, of which 17 million are foreign visitors, which makes the city and its region the world's leading tourism destination, housing four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Incomes
The average Parisian net household income (after social, pension and health insurance contributions) was 36,085 euros in Paris for 2011. It ranges from €22,095 in the 19th arrondissement to €82,449 in the 7th arrondissement. The median taxable income for 2011 was around 25,000 euros in Paris and 22,200 for Île-de-France. Generally speaking, incomes are higher in the Western part of the city and in the western suburbs than in the northern and eastern parts of the urban area. Unemployment in the Paris "immigrant ghettos" ranges from 20 to 40 per cent, according to varying sources.