The town hall of Paris undertakes not to cut down any tree at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, one of its assistants announced on Monday May 2, in the face of the controversy aroused by a project to redevelop the district which threatened around twenty trees, sometimes centuries old.
“There will be no tree felling, the commitment is made by Anne Hidalgo”, assured on Twitter Christophe Najdovski, the assistant for green spaces and biodiversity.
“The project will be reviewed so that each tree is preserved,” he said, trying to extinguish the controversy born in recent days because of the “OnE” project, which planned to revegetate and “pedestrianize” the surroundings. of the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower, while removing certain trees to build, in particular, luggage storage for visitors and premises for employees.
An online petition has collected 90,000 signatures
These future developments have aroused the opposition of several associations and personalities. A petition launched on the change.org site, and relayed by the very popular radio and television host Nagui, the journalist Hugo Clément or the former boss of Medef Laurence Parisot, has collected more than 90,000 signatures since Saturday.
Faced with this start of the fire, the town hall had already tried to calm things down through the voice of the first deputy Emmanuel Grégoire, who assured on Saturday that “no century-old tree will be cut down”.
Monday evening on Twitter, the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo shared the message of Christophe Najdovski promising to abandon any plan of felling, without distinguishing between century-old trees and others.
170,000 trees planted and 5 urban forests created
The elected environmentalists of Paris have published a press release, demanding “that the location of the luggage storage and premises be re-examined” for the employees, whom they wish to “move to sites which do not require felling of trees”.
“Each tree counts and we will continue to remain vigilant in order to avoid any felling, whether on the site of the Eiffel Tower or on other urban projects of the City of Paris”, insisted the group, ally of the socialists within the municipal majority.
According to the town hall, the redevelopment of the Eiffel Tower district should make it possible to plant more than 200 new trees and create 1.6 hectares of green space.
Former presidential candidate Anne Hidalgo has made the greening of the capital a major objective of her second term, with promises to plant 170,000 additional trees or create five “urban forests” and four new parks.