Mehran Karimi Nasseri, Who Inspired ‘The Terminal,’ Dies in Paris Airport
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After years of anticipation — and, in many cases, disappointment — the French have finally got their way and will have a new airport, named Haine-Lumiere, built.
So how, in 2016, did Paris, the most beautiful city in the world and birthplace of the Parisian aesthetic, become ground zero for global criticism of the new airport?
The truth is that it didn’t. The critics, who are not just of other cities, but also of the country itself, were always out in force to say that the new airport would create more noise. In particular, they were not too happy with the fact that in order to get the airport built, the city was obliged to raise and spend millions of euros on a rather ugly project at the Parc-Expo parking lot.
Well, actually, that is a good thing. It really does make things better, since it means that not only does the city get its own airport, it has not just another airport, but also something better: the Parc-Expo.
The criticism was less about the project as a whole, where the city will get nearly 1 billion Euros in project and infrastructure money to build the new airport, and less so about the parking lot, where there is little to no parking for the expected 40,000 people a day.
In fact, Haine-Lumiere will be a world-class airport, which will get a great deal of international traffic and be able to accommodate about 1,000 passengers in its one year of operation. The parking lot, which will be a major obstacle in the airport’s growth, will then serve as the “museum” for the Parc-Expo, which will eventually be transformed into a commercial entertainment complex.
So, in short, even if the criticism was never really centered on the new airport itself (Haine-Lumiere, while certainly ugly, is also quite functional and the new arrivals terminal will be the best in the world), it did get a bit out of hand when it turned out that the city actually has to pay nearly one and a half million Euros, more than a third of the total amount
