Urbanism - - Page 3

Construction at Seine Rive Gauche

My piece on Seine Rive Gauche, billed as the largest urban project in Paris since Haussmann, generated a great deal of interest. This week I return to the area to check up on progress, and find development continuing along the whole length of the site.

This project is mobilizing considerable resources and is calling on France’s best architecture and urban design talents. Whatever one things of the design choices, it certainly represents a return to the spirit of urban ambition that made Paris what it is.

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News from Place de la République

Last Thursday, June 21st, was a big day for the Place de la République as construction for the new lay-out of the square entered phase 2 (see background in my post Place de la République).

With this, an important symbol of the current city administration’s move away from the car-centric urban planning is beginning to be visible.

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Exploring Grand Paris: Choisy-le-Roi

I continue my exploration of the petite couronne, the ring of municipalities around Paris proper that are at the center of the transformation of greater Paris. Today I travel south-east to Choisy-le-Roi, surely one of the most disconcerting mixes of periods and urban typologies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century to be found anywhere.

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A New Generation Bus Stop

The Paris public transportation authority, the RATP, has installed a new prototype of a multi-service bus stop. The concept is interesting: to move the bus stop from just being a shelter to becoming a center for all types of small urban functions. The prototype is up and intriguing Parisians on a site across the street from the Gare de Lyon.

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Circuler at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine

Mobility is central to the story of cities. Circuler, the new exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris takes a panoramic view of this subject to explore the links between movement and the built human environment.

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Exploring Grand Paris: Malakoff

The ring of towns adjacent to Paris known as the Petite Couronne is currently the most interesting part of the metropolis.

As separate entities from Paris proper, each municipality has developed its own identity and unique history. Now, however, with the gentrification of Paris pushing more and more middle-class people outside the city limits, they are changing. These are territories full of projects and ideas, often with young populations and key protagonists who tend to be more on the margin of the Parisian establishment.

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Densifying Paris

For years, the urban agenda in Paris revolved around the preservation of the historical core, the expansion of the metropolis on its rural fringes, and the development of selected locations such as La Défense. But now the focus has shifted toward a more comprehensive development of the existing city, especially in the area outside the historical core, with a view to densifying the entire metropolitan footprint.

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Skyscrapers Are Not What’s Going To Save The City

Ed Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City has launched a highly salutary discussion of the virtues of cities. But while it is full of excellent points, Triumph of the City goes off track in its prescriptions by giving the idea that the answer to the density issue is to build skyscrapers. In making that unwarranted leap, Glaeser has risked undermining the impact of his book as a whole. This is a pity, as the core message of Triumph of the City is one that needs to be well understood.

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The Struggle for a Bigger Paris

In many cities, growth has led to a situation where the metropolitan area is considerably bigger than the city proper. Paris, where the city limits remain frozen as they were in 1860, is an extreme case of this phenomenon.

Today only 21% of dwellers of the Parisian “urban unit” live in the municipality of Paris, which covers a scant 4% of the metropolitan territory. This situation hampers policy development and implementation for the metropolis and is increasingly seen as an unnecessary handicap for Paris in the global competition among cities.

The question, in this election year, is whether Paris will be able to achieve its first expansion in more than 150 years, whether it will finally be able to give itself a government at the scale of the metropolis.

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Seine Rive Gauche

Seine Rive Gauche is beginning to come to life. Covering 320 acres (130 hectares), it is, according to its developer, the largest development project in Paris since Haussmann’s time.

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