Desperately short of space for new housing and offices, the city that boasts one of the world’s most unspoiled skylines is considering lifting a 30-year-old ban on skyscrapers.
Paris, which outlawed buildings of more than about eight storeys in the city centre in 1974, is strikingly uncluttered with high-rise towers. But its restricted surface area of 40 square miles — combined with an optimistic election pledge by the Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, to provide 50 000 new homes — means that the mayor may be forced to build up, rather than out, to meet the city’s needs.
”The historic centre won’t be affected, nor will there be a forest of high-rises anywhere,” the deputy mayor in charge of town planning, Jean-Pierre Caffet, said yesterday. ”We’re not talking about creating Manhattan in Paris. But on the other hand, the city cannot become a museum-city.”
In an interview with the Le Parisien daily, Caffet said the city hall would prefer individual ”sympathetically designed” high-rises in a few ”carefully chosen” locations, to a concentration of further towers in the relatively rare areas where they already exist.
None of Paris’s classical Haussman neighbourhoods would be touched. ”But on the other hand, we do not want to rule out all diversification, all modernity, all modification of the urban landscape,” Caffet said. ”In my view, what is important is not so much the dogma about the number of storeys, but the where, the why and the how.”
Paris’s overall area was ”tiny for a major city”, he said.
The ban on skyscrapers was imposed under pressure from President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing after a number of monumental (and monumentally out-of-place) constructions, such as the 209-metre Montparnasse tower, completed in 1972. Under the ban, which has largely been respected, buildings were limited to a height of 31 metres within the city limits and 25 in the historic centre.
Caffet stressed that no firm decisions had been made — the real debate would have to await a new urban planning bill, due to come into force next year. But the Green party and the capital’s opposition conservatives are already up in arms. The former mayor, Jean Tiberi, declared himself ”stupefied” by the plans, and the Greens’ leader, Alain Riou, said they were ”an invitation to battle”.
The deputy mayor promised there would be no ”nightmare vision”. City landmarks and national treasures, such as the Louvre and the Notre Dame cathedral, would not in the near future be overshadowed by glass and concrete monstrosities. ”We’re thinking more about the outer arrondissements, in areas where there’s already a considerable mix of architectural styles and periods,” he said.
”We will retain strict aesthetic control. We have no intention of simply handing a site over to a property developer and saying, ‘Go for it’.”
There have been rows about the skyline in the past. Before the opening of the 324 metre-high Eiffel Tower in 1889, the author Guy de Maupassant mounted a petition against ”an odious tower of extreme bad taste”. He subsequently lunched there as often as he could, saying the restaurant was the only place from which the tower could not be seen. – Guardian Unlimited Â