Paris City Hall promises 300 hectares of additional green spaces

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: GARDEL BERTRAND / HEMIS.FR / HEMIS.FR / HEMIS VIA AFP 19:47 p.m., May 25, 2023

The mayor of Paris, led by the socialist Anne Hidalgo, promises 300 hectares of additional green spaces accessible to the public with its future local urban plan (PLU), supposed to protect "definitively" part of these spaces and force real estate projects to compensation. To reach the standard of the World Health Organization (WHO) of 10m2 of green spaces per inhabitant, the municipality will "seek 300 hectares of green spaces in creation or opening", that is to say already existing but not yet accessible to the public, said the assistant to the revegetation Christophe Najdovski Wednesday evening during a presentation at the City Hall.

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And in this total, the town hall wants to create "55 hectares of new parks in the diffuse (the existing building) and the new development areas," explained the assistant to urban planning Emmanuel Grégoire Thursday at a press briefing on a newly vegetated square of the twelfth arrondissement.

"A large park of more than 25 hectares"

The left-wing executive plans to create "a large park of more than 25 hectares" between the gates of La Villette and La Chapelle, in the north-east of Paris. Emmanuel Grégoire also counts in this total "70 hectares of public spaces" and "40 hectares of private plots", such as the parking lots of residences, which will be "deasphalted" and vegetated. It also includes, while a part is already accessible to the public, "90 hectares of protected green spaces (EVP)" which will be "definitively protected from destruction", while the current PLU "allowed to build on a EVP". For the first deputy, "the goal is to open all this within ten years".

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The future Parisian PLU, which must be adopted for the first time on June 5 by the Council of Paris, for final adoption between 2024 and 2025, also provides for a gradual free-of-land compensation rule for any real estate project larger than 150m2. The two deputies also took stock of Anne Hidalgo's promise to plant 170,000 trees by 2026, a quantitative goal castigated by her opponents. With more than 25,000 trees planted last winter, "never, since Haussmann (in the nineteenth century, editor's note), we have planted so much in Paris," said Najdovski. With 63,500 trees planted mid-term, "more than a third of this goal will have been achieved," says the town hall. Among the trees planted in the last six months, 800 have been planted in the streets of Paris, the vast majority being integrated into the embankments of the ring road (11,500) or the woods of Vincennes and Boulogne (7,300).