Greening the City

Figuring out how to make cities greener

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In Paris, there are, on average, 5.8 m² of green spaces per inhabitant. If you include the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, this area increases to 14.4 m². That’s far less than in Rome, with 321 m² per inhabitant, Madrid with 68 m², or Amsterdam with 36 m². In the past few years, redevelopment of industrial and railway sites has enabled the Paris town council to create the André Citroën and Bercy parks. But how can you further increase the area given over to green spaces in this very old, compact city, where there is little spare land available?
When the Paris city council reviewed the Local Planning Program (PLU) after consulting with residents, they decided to do away with the possibility of allowing all open spaces around new constructions to be developed on a concrete base. 20% of these open spaces will now have to be based directly in the soil. In addition, a percentage of additional planted space will be calculated, depending on the lack of green spaces in the neighborhood and on the treatment (fully earthen floor, earth on a concrete floor, planted roof, planted balconies, etc). “This ‘planting coefficient’ or ‘biotope coefficient’ should be at least 10% for those neighborhoods least lacking in green spaces (15% for those with the greatest shortage), for planting of land, preferably directly in the soil,” explains Mehand Meziani, an architect and town-planner at the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme (1), which carried out Paris’s PLU assessment.
"If an earthen floor is technically unfeasible,” he adds, “the builder will need to compensate by developing, for concrete bases, twice the planned planted ground area, three times the area as a roof, or five times the area as a planted wall. The builder will of course be able to combine these various approaches.” Inspired by experimental approaches in Berlin and other Northern European cities, this initiative is likely to be taken up in France, particularly by the city of Lyon, as part of its new PLU, which is now under review.