The aim of this chapter is to briefly present the Île-de-France region at the end of the decade 2010– 20 and to set out the politico-institutional framework within which the actors and the ongoing public policies operate. First, however, I need to clearly define the territory that we are discussing.

There is heated debate about the geographical boundaries of the Paris metropolis, because there is a strong political dimension to these boundaries – as will be evident throughout this book. That is why, before developing our analysis of France's leading metropolitan region, it will be helpful to briefly specify its contours and to explain the choice of our territory of study. The Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) defines the functional territory of French cities through the notion of the “urban area” (aire urbaine), which it defines as

Under this definition, the Paris urban area comprises almost 12.5 million inhabitants distributed across some 1,800 municipalities and an area of land of a little more than 17,000 sq. km. It extends over almost the entire Île-de-France region (98.8 per cent of municipalities) and over a very small part of the seven départements surrounding it.

In this book, the choice is to focus almost exclusively on the Île-de-France region, thus treating it as equivalent to the Paris urban area. The reasons for this choice are, first, that there is a fairly good match between the territory of Île-de-France and the Paris urban area (see Map 1.1) but, above all, because Île-de-France is the scale used by the authorities – and, in particular, by the government – in applying its policies, and it corresponds to the scope of the decision-making and consultative structures not only of the political institutions but also of the economic community and civil society.