Among the 300 new hectares of green spaces that Paris City Hall aims to make accessible to the public by 2040, as displayed in the future local urban plan (PLU), around fifty hectares are planned in the North -Is Parisian. In this volume, a single park of 27 hectares – slightly more than the Buttes Chaumont or the Tuileries garden – must see the light of day. A beneficial development for the sector, one of the harshest in the capital, where greenery is sorely lacking. In summer, the effects of urban heat islands are particularly marked there, while to the east of the canal St Denis the lawns of La Villette cool the nights.
However, it is difficult to imagine what “large urban park”, as the Parisian Urban Planning Workshop (APUR) calls it, by trying to reach, today, on foot, the Porte de La Villette from the Porte de La Chapelle. The sector, one of the last major operations currently being developed in the capital, is a vast construction site. Against the A1 interchange ends that of the new Arena, where the badminton, para-taekwondo and para-badminton competitions will take place during the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Opposite, the Condorcet campus, which will accommodate 3,500 human sciences students at the start of the 2025 school year, is emerging. Elsewhere, further away, everywhere, barriers, impassable sites. A first phase of the Chapelle-Charbon park opened in 2020. But to understand the “system” as a whole, it is still better to look at the maps of town planners and landscapers.
Dotted lines
On these, a green strip stretches from the A1 interchange to La Villette, surrounds the ring road, that of the Maréchaux, thickens, suddenly narrows, widens again. There, dotted lines, elsewhere the names of squares which add up. “Designing a contemporary park in a constrained area is a question that many cities ask themselves”, comments Alexandre Labasse, director of APUR. This is to say that this continuous green space of just over 27 hectares will not be a vast expanse of lawn behind gates. This “large urban park”as it is designed, is more of a long promenade, which crosses squares, connects them with sufficiently green public spaces, all as far away from cars as possible.
It was because we had to deal with the constraints of the place. Man has in fact placed there, in this pass between the Montmartre hill and the Romainville plateau, all the infrastructures necessary for the functioning of a city: canals, railway lines (those of the Gare du Nord and the Gare of the East), two highways, and the often massive warehouses that go with them. When the Dusapin & Leclercq agency and the landscapers from the Ter agency were retained in 2004 to imagine the future of the site, they decided to reveal “the genius of networks”, therefore to assume them. THE “large urban park” must insert itself into all of this and try to unify everything.
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