HOW TO MAKE PARIS GROW SMART? 

Delphine Soulas

For the past six or seven years, the city of Paris has started to take into account smart growth in its new projects. For example, the banks of the Seine and other districts such as the Canal Saint-Martin are often closed to cars during weekends in order to encourage cyclers, rollerbladers and pedestrians to come and enjoy the car-free streets. But, as is often the case, more can be done, especially when it comes to creating alternatives to automobile dependency.

The July 2007 arrival of free commuter-bicycles all over Paris is a first step. But bicycle lanes are still lacking in some key transit areas, and more should be created in order to increase the security of the increasing bicycle-commuter population.

Another way of reducing automobile dependence would be to encourage people to use public transportation. Incentives are needed for people in the suburbs to use the commuter train system (RER), such as free parking lots at the end of the main metro lines and at RER stations, for those outer-Paris dwellers who do not live near a rail station and must take a slow bus from their house to get to their nearest train transportation. Some cities, such as Rennes in Brittany, already provide free parking in order to encourage train use. Even if Paris is bigger, or because it is bigger, parking facilities are urgent in order to reduce the number of cars flowing into downtown Paris.

Other cities such as London, Singapore and Stockholm have chosen to create tolls for people who want to drive downtown. Though such policies are pretty efficient (according to the Transport of London, which is responsible for all public transportation in London, traffic in the taxed area decreased by 18% in one year), they are not socially fair since everybody pays the same price whatever their income.

Local stores also have to be a priority in smart growth projects. Here again, the idea is to reduce people’s use of cars in their daily lives. If local administrators pay attention to that problem and encourage local businesses, people won’t need to go to big malls outside Paris to do shopping or to buy something to eat, as it is too often the case in small cities in the United States. Within Paris, local commerce continues to thrive, though it is in a state of transformation. The city encourages what is called commerce de proximité. However, in many downtown areas, as people move out, businesses move in, and diversity is lost. These become “dead” neighborhoods. A lack of food markets, laundromats, hardware stores, and sometimes, even cafés, is a sign of a neighborhood that is losing its lived-in sense of place. Many of the most diverse neighborhoods are outside the tourist core of the city, but the center of the city fights hard to sustain itself, and the third, fourth fifth and parts of the sixth districts (arrondissements), both sides of the Seine, are holding on to their residential character, which means commerce de proximité is alive and well.

Though not the only priority of smart-growth advocates, transportation remains as the vital circulatory system of a healthy city, and as functional and efficient as the Paris Metro-RER-bus-tramway system is, certain arteries are becoming much too crowded. Many people from the Asnières or Saint-Denis near north suburbs would gladly leave their cars home if Metro line 13 were not more congested than the proverbial can of sardines. For Paris to be amongst the leaders of the smart growth rankings,

1.      the Metro system needs improvement (in the style of the automated line 14), where trains run every two minutes;

2.      suburban dwellers need better parking facilities and faster inter-suburb bus service in order to be able to leave their cars home;

3.      financial incentives for low-cost housing are urgently needed to keep people living in the theme-parkish center of town, as well as in the gentrifying near-center neighborhoods, in order to protect and nurture the diversity that is necessary for a vibrant city.

PART FOUR:

AND BEYOND

If you speak about consuming less and living better, you will face the inevitable critique. “It is easy for you, with a comfortable lifestyle, to talk about living with less, but how can you preach such things to people in poor countries, for whom growth is a necessity?”

One component of smart growth is the re-localization of the economy: producing and consuming locally. This is the foundation of alternative regional currencies, such as the Berkshares. But wouldn’t such economic bioregionalism be harmful to the aspirations of poor countries? And, what is the relationship between wealth and happiness?