OUTSIDE SPACES 099
bike’ is a fine metaphor for the change that has taken place in the city over the last year, and is likely to happen in the years to come. Te key moment was December 2019, when a strike shut down buses and trains for months. Te ‘Plan vélo’ was far from done, but enough routes were ready that record numbers of commuters pedalled to work. And while citizens were having urban epiphanies, city officials were facing an epidemiological fact: when Parisians emerged from lockdown, they could not just crowd back into the Métro again. Paris in the saddle was here to stay. It did not go unnoticed that vélo is an anagram for love.
It’s not all poetry. Many bike routes remain treacherous or incomplete, but activists that spent years pressing for cycle lanes suddenly saw them appearing before their eyes. 100 temporary bike lanes may yet become permanent. It is not just cycle lanes either. At last, there are green agenda schemes set to become reality. For example, the city is determined to reduce road traffic. Cars take up half the public space, but only 13% of journeys are made in them, and most spend 95% of their life in garages or parking spaces. Four central arrondissements are set to become restricted zones for cars.
Left The planned biodiverse corridor in central Paris, designed by Gustafson Porter + Bowman; a major symbol of the city’s belief in new forms of urban planning
Above right Kathryn Gustafson of Gustafson Porter + Bowman
In 2019, it was announced that Gustafson Porter + Bowman had won a competition to redesign a 54ha area around the Eiffel Tower, with the aim of unifying the site from the Trocadéro to the École Militaire via the Palais de Chaillot, the Pont d’Iéna and the Champ de Mars to create a ‘biodiverse corridor’ with a mix of classical and picturesque gardens, bringing a unified environmental approach to the area – a garden stretching for 1.5km, with the world’s most recognisable monument at its centre. Te London-based company’s scheme was one of four shortlisted from 42 entries in a major international competition. Johnson would have approved: three of its five partners are women. Kathryn Gustafson, Mary Bowman and Sibylla Hartel; two Americans and a German. And out of
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