Like a halfway stage between Paris and its adjoining communes, the “Ring Road City” – a name adopted here by members of TOMATO Architectes to study the specific features of the belt encircling the capital and imagine how it might develop – is an unlikely area in which much of the present and future of the entire region is both taking shape and being resolved. This book shows the existence of the Ring Road City as a fully-fledged urban entity, full of many different opportunities and developments. So it offers an invitation to reject unfavourable preconceptions, and get away from preconceived ideas associated with the break created by the ring road and the various forms of pollution – noise and other – it gives rise to. As Jacques Lucan emphasizes, the ring road might accordingly no longer appear as a “factor of separation, but rather as a necessary link between all the different parts of the metropolis”. A journey that introduces us to a city undergoing far-reaching changes.