GRIGNY, France — Paris is about to get bigger, much bigger. Next year, assuming plans move ahead, the city and a ring of inner suburbs will be joined, in an effort to redress a century’s worth of urban decisions that have exacerbated the country’s gaping cultural divide.

The new Métropole du Grand Paris, or Metropolis of Greater Paris, will include nearly seven million people, more than triple the population now living in the central city. It will swallow rich suburbs to the west. But it should also provide better access to jobs and to business hubs and, if it really works, a greater sense of belonging for millions of immigrant families who live in poverty and isolation on the city’s southern, northern and eastern fringes. Resources would be redistributed, in particular those dealing with housing. The complexion of Paris would change.

France is scrambling to remedy the inequities highlighted by the Charlie Hebdo attack, troubles that have unraveled the nation’s social fabric and alienated Muslim and migrant youths, radicalizing a few. Urban renewal and remapping the capital are a start.

But France must also reckon with its abiding racism, which pushed poor and unwanted citizens out from central Paris in the first place. Those people came to towns like this, in the second ring of suburbs, close to Orly airport, an entry point for generations of North African immigrants who are now part of the melting pot in Grigny.