Paris is about to vote on its anti-global warming urban plan: what will change

2023-06-03 06:00:20

In front of a green wall rue d’Aboukir, in Paris, on July 13, 2019. ALAIN JOCARD / AFP

When it won Paris in 2001, the left had one priority: to provide the capital with new town planning rules to build more housing there, and above all housing accessible to all. The new local urban plan (PLU) adopted in 2006 aimed to introduce social diversity in the west, that is to say elsewhere than in the working-class districts. A little less than twenty years later, the expected rebalancing is not as clear as hoped, but the city, which produced nearly 115,000 apartments over the period, has gone from 13% to 25% social housing, threshold crossed recently.

The day after her re-election in the spring of 2020, the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo announces a new in-depth revision of the building and town planning rules. The desire to house Parisians at affordable prices remains, but this time the urgency is elsewhere: it is a question of accelerating the adaptation of the capital to global warming, and of ensuring that the city which gave its name to the Paris agreements will be carbon neutral in 2050. The future PLU would therefore be “bioclimatic”, and the capital one of the first cities ” in the world ” to arm themselves with such a tool, assures the majority.

At the end of three years of discussions and negotiations, the document which must shape Paris for the next thirty to forty years is presented, Monday, June 5, to the Council of Paris. The step is major. Drafting an urban law is also “the expression of a vision”, recalls Anne Hidalgo. If at the end of this day of debates, the text is approved, the 3,000 pages of draft regulations and maps then pass into the hands of the State. A long phase of public inquiry follows, during which everyone will be able to give their opinion. If the legal innovations, there are always some with the Parisian PLUs, pass the filter of the control of legality, the final vote could take place at the end of 2024, or the beginning of 2025.

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300 additional hectares of green spaces

The whole program is in the title; the next PLU must respond to the environmental emergency. Paris, historically mineral, must green at all costs. “The greening of the city must change scale”, insists the mayor. When the World Health Organization recommends a dozen square meters of local green space per inhabitant in the city, Parisians only have 5.8 (excluding wood). A source of well-being, trees are also powerful air conditioners.

The united majority – socialists, ecologists and communists – promises 300 additional hectares of green spaces in the next two decades. The effort is considerable. Between 2014 and 2020, only 30 hectares have been created. Seventy hectares, i.e. the equivalent of ten large parks, have already been planned, particularly in the North-East (Chapelle-Charbon, les Messageries, Porte de la Villette, Bercy-Charenton), but also in part of 15 heliport^e. Ninety hectares of private land are protected. The city has also identified plots on which it wants to develop parks, as it did in the 11^e with the Truillot garden, instead of a car park. At the same time, it approaches institutions to open their gates. This is already the case for the Catherine-Labouré garden, in the 7^e district, property of the Daughters of Charity. It will soon be with the National Institute for Blind Youth, opposite the Necker Hospital. The City is discussing the Val-de-Grâce gardens with the State.

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