Paris Is About to Change
Updated at 12:15 p.m. ET on September 5, 2020. The pandemic hit Paris hard. It hit poor Paris suburbs harder. Paris had already staked its future on merging with a wide ring of banlieue towns to form the new Metropolis of Grand Paris—an environmentally resilient 21st-century capital. But the coronavirus made clear how urgent that transformation really is.Last year, more than 38 million people visited Paris. This summer, international travel bans sent hotel occupancy down 86 percent.