If you're told that the largest city hall in France is located in the Paris region, many would naturally think of the City Hall of Paris. However, the building often mentioned for this title isn’t actually in the capital but in a different municipality within Île-de-France.
For decades, the town hall of Gennevilliers, located in the Hauts-de-Seine department, has often been described as the largest municipal building in France. This claim appears regularly in numerous articles, local documents, and urban stories. Built during the 1960s and 1970s, the Gennevilliers town hall doesn’t resemble a traditional city hall. Instead, it stands out as a sprawling administrative complex covering a notably large footprint on the ground.
The project is driven by a very clear vision: to bring together a wide range of municipal services in one location, in a city experiencing rapid demographic and industrial growth. This approach results in a large, functional building designed primarily as a work tool rather than an architectural landmark. It is this extensive size and impressive footprint that often lead the Gennevilliers Town Hall to be called the largest town hall in France.
However, this designation is based on a very specific criterion: the total area and footprint of the site. And that’s where the debate really kicks off. Because another town hall in Île-de-France also stands out for its size: the one in Créteil, in Val-de-Marne.
Built in the 1970s, Créteil's City Hall takes a radically different approach. Instead of traditional grandeur, its impressive presence is expressed through verticality. The structure features a 75-meter-high administrative tower mounted on a circular base that welcomes visitors.
Designed as a centralized administrative hub in a city that has grown into a prefecture, the Créteil town hall brings together a substantial built area and a wide array of public services on a single site. Thanks to its size, height, and administrative capacity, it is often touted as one of the largest town halls in France as well.
In reality, Gennevilliers and Créteil embody two different ways of being “the biggest”: Gennevilliers in terms of land area, and Créteil in terms of built volume, height, and mass. There is therefore no single official ranking that definitively settles the matter. The title depends on the criterion chosen, which explains why these two cities are often brought up in this context.
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