İstanbul looks to Paris for key to successful urban transformation Télécharger l’article 18 March 2012 / LATİFA AKAY , İSTANBUL “The word impossible is not French,” the French leader Napoleon penned in a letter to General Jean Le Marois in 1813. Close to two centuries later and it is likely that the current French President Nicolas Sarkozy was reading from the same page as his bold predecessor when he devised the idea of his “Grand Paris” project in 2007, a fanciful plan aiming to define future developments in Paris and its surrounding area to create a prototypical 21st century city attuned to the expectations of the post-Kyoto era. Fixated on the idea of a bigger and better Paris, Sarkozy set