Structural and Civil Engineering Research

Paris, France's capital is a major European city and a global center for art, fashion, gastronomy and culture. Its 19th-century cityscape is crisscrossed by wide boulevards and the River Seine. Beyond such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower and the 12th-century, Gothic Notre-Dame cathedral, the city is known for its cafe culture and designer boutiques along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

For a significant period of time Paris has been one of the world's most goal and engaging urban networks. It is reviving for the open entryways it offers for business and exchange, for inspect, for culture, and for beguilement; its gastronomy, high design, painting, composing, and academic gathering especially value a fortunate reputation. Its sobriquet "the City of Light" ("la Ville Lumière"), earned in the midst of the Enlightenment, remains fitting, for Paris has held its hugeness as a center for guideline and insightful premiums. Paris' site at an intersection of both water and land courses basic to France and also to Europe has affected its advancement.

The City of Paris's administrative limits form an East-West oval centred on the island at its historical heart, the Île de la Cité; this island is near the top of an arc of the river Seine that divides the city into southern Rive Gauche (Left Bank) and northern Rive Droite regions. Paris is the core of a built-up area that extends well beyond its limits: commonly referred to as the agglomération Parisienne, and statistically as measure of urban area, the Paris agglomeration's 2013 population of 10,601,122 made it the largest urban area in the European Union. City-influenced commuter activity reaches well beyond even this in a statistical aire urbaine de Paris (a measure of metropolitan area), that had a 2013 population of 12,405,426, a number one-fifth the population of France, the largest metropolitan area in the Eurozone.