It was one of the twenty-two winning projects which was to “Reinventing Paris”, and even, for this one, to re-enchant the ring road since a building-bridge, planted with a thousand trees, was going to span the expressway and connect, to the west of the capital, Porte Maillot to Neuilly. Better known under the name of the Thousand Trees project, the suspended district imagined by the Japanese architects Sou Fujimoto and French Manal Rachdi was to accommodate a hundred housing units, a hotel, a nursery, offices, a panoramic restaurant. But in a decision made public Friday, July 3, the Paris administrative court canceled the building permit on the grounds that the operation “Is likely to have a negative impact on public health”.
From the start, this spectacular project has fascinated as much as it raised criticism. And very quickly, the green light given in August 2019 by the town hall of Paris to the Compagnie de Phalsbourg was attacked. Initially by the Beauvais airport, because the site required to temporarily move the bus station where the travelers who take the bus to their plane meet. The second blow was struck by an environmental coalition bringing together the associations Les Amis de la Terre, France nature environnement, but also several elected officials from Paris, including David Belliard, the current deputy (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, EELV) of Anne Hidalgo in charge of transport and mobility. In their eyes, the very idea of creating a district above an urban motorway, in a place where automobile pollution is particularly important, poses a problem.
“High level of air pollution”
The court went in their direction. Today, this district, north of Porte Maillot, is already marked “By a high level of air pollution, beyond the limit values set by the environment code and the recommendations of the World Health Organization for the concentration of nitrogen dioxide and fine particles” , recalls justice, impact study in support.
However, although the construction of the bridge building itself will not increase ambient air pollution, it will nevertheless have the effect of moving pollutants (more than 20% of nitrogen dioxide) to streets. where there are housing, offices but also a residence for the elderly. In addition, and the environmental authority underlined in its opinion delivered in October 2018, “The site of the future crèche, which will be built just above the future bus station, will remain exposed to values exceeding or approaching the reference threshold values”.
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