When the masked thugs of ISIS swing their sledgehammers through Iraq’s museums and dynamite Palmyra, the world gasps and screams. But what if the vandal is a chic Parisian woman wearing high-heeled boots and talking like a visionary? What if her target is the world’s most beloved and most-visited city? Does the world gasp, or does it not even hear what she is saying? “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick tells Elsa in “Casablanca.” Yet now, Mayor Anne Hidalgo says she will “reinvent” Paris. Without putting it to a vote, she will replace the uniquely harmonious city we know with something “modern” and “contemporary.” She will pierce the low horizon with a dozen skyscrapers, replace classic stone facades with rivers of glass, and bury the famous zinc and slate rooftops under new construction. Mon Dieu! Doesn’t anyone get what Paris is doing to itself?

Wake up, world! Mayor Hidalgo will march through Paris like Sherman through Georgia. Cooing soothing words from the lexicon of global capital, she will dot that low skyline with bleeding-edge skyscrapers in bizarre shapes, one a triangle, one a stack of glass boxes, one shaped into two leaning towers. That’s “reinventing.” Right now, Paris is a city of stone. Mayor Hidalgo will add the same concrete-glass-steel texture that has made so many cities worldwide into banal clones. That’s “reinventing.”

Is the world really so narcotized, so mesmerized, by the words “modern” and “contemporary,” so intimidated by the stars of international architecture and commerce, so distracted by the mayor’s elegant appearance, that it can value Palmyra and forget Paris?

And can anyone really believe the mayor’s claims? Can any solar-panel magic make these glass structures sustainable? Will corporate behemoths really flock to Paris once another skyscraper, like the much-despised Tour Montparnasse, looms over the city’s six- and eight-story buildings?

As U.S. liaison for SOS Paris, the French preservationist group, and as founder of the International Coalition for the Preservation of Paris, I know this battle is just a skirmish in a larger war for Paris. We honor humanity’s delight in the uniqueness of beloved cities, Paris among them. Out-spent and out-publicized, fragilely-funded Davids, we fight for urban traditions that reach through the long and tumultuous history of Paris, defending against globalized, standardized, architecture.