Paris (AFP)

"We will have to present our best face to the world for the Olympic Games" of 2024: the mathematician Cédric Villani, dissident candidate and now ex-LREM at the town hall of Paris, said to dream of an "enlarged" capital to solve "the problems" Parisians.

Q: What is the Paris you promise for five, 10 or 15 years?

A: "I'm going to aim for four years already because we have to think about the Olympic Games, which are coming in 2024. This is the moment when we will have to present our best face to the world and if, at the time of the Olympic Games, we still have dirty streets, street brawls, rascality, dealers who annoy each other, well that's what will be in the newspapers around the world. The priority is to bring back serenity, reduce traffic jams, put in place a municipal police force that will bring appeasement and avoid incivility, re-train the city's cleaning services.

At 15, and I hope long before, we will see the new, enlarged Paris, in which the borders will no longer be those of the current ring road but those which will also include the 22 neighboring municipalities ".

Q: Can a mayor of Paris want to annex the neighboring municipalities?

A: "There is an anomaly, Paris is a capital which has grown over the centuries and which has stopped its development in the middle, in the same borders as those of Adolphe Thiers' precincts in 1860, (allowing) municipalities like Belleville or Auteuil to integrate Paris. When we make international comparisons, we see that Paris is very small, it's not even 100 km2 where London is 1,515 times more. And this smallness handicaps. not by acting inside Paris that we will be able to solve the problems of mobility, traffic jams, housing. I went to meet the mayors of neighboring municipalities to get their opinion, and the answers were always a bit same: + Out of the question +, and then they say: + I believe that this is the meaning of History +. "

Q: How do you plan to use artificial intelligence to reduce pollution in Paris?

A: "Ecology as I advocate it is a rational scientific ecology, based on studies, indicators, with all the measurement systems to check the pollution. We saw during the fire of Notre-Dame -from Paris as we were ill-equipped to detect lead pollution, we need sensors that inform us every day about everything that pollutes, about nitrogen oxides ... We need more diagnostics.

Politics is also the way in which technologies, sciences and diagnostics are integrated in the service of humans. For example, you create at least forty + peaceful districts in Paris, in which you work on the village spirit, that means preventing cars from coming onto the tracks. We must find common sense prohibited that will make the route that the car wants to take no longer just a shortcut, review the traffic plans. "

Q: What about transport?

A: "Artificial intelligence fuels a lot of fantasies, but it's nothing smart, it's just sophisticated algorithm. Paris is one of the world capitals of artificial intelligence, because we train excellent researchers, excellent engineers. At the medical level, it allows you to identify cancer, better than the best human experts. Thanks to artificial intelligence, where you have software that works according to a cadastre, of an urban plan, automatically tell you where are the best places to install solar panels. There is software which from cameras installed on vehicles locate the streets which are dirtier than the others, which need come back and clean up. On the road, artificial intelligence can help better synchronize and streamline traffic. Moscow has done it, it's not the most fluid city, but you have to see where they were leaving".

Q: Is Paris good ground for a scientist like you?

A: "With my quality as a scientist, an intellectual engaged in politics, it is I who carry the project, which is both more rational and who has the vision of the future, an international vision. And, it is the dream city for a scientist: firstly because there are so many problems to solve, secondly because it is the city that the whole world is looking at. We have a duty to be up to par and Paris is this great city of experimentation".

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