ways to adapt Paris to global warming

By Emeline Cazi

Posted today at 11:00 a.m.

Any revision of the local urban plan (PLU) has its share of imposed figures. The portrait of the capital, which has appeared a few weeks ago on the website of the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme (APUR) in the form of a library of a hundred maps and graphics, is one of them. It was a question of drawing up an inventory of the territory before writing the new rule, promised by 2024, which will have to say how to build and develop Paris so that the city emits the least possible carbon dioxide (the building is responsible for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions) and remains livable despite global warming.

The result of the immense documentary work carried out by the town planning agency is first of all a complete photo of Paris and its inhabitants, taken in 2020, and accessible to as many people as possible. For the first time, in fact, the territorial diagnosis is published online, and not only available in paper version in district town halls, as was the case during the last revision of the PLU, in 2006. A time when open data was only just beginning to be theorized.

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Everyone can therefore dive into these maps at their leisure, which can be zoomed by plot, and auscultate the capital from all angles, through one of the multiple prisms offered (density, income, type of habitat, presence of shops , the number of places of innovation, the most noisy streets, etc.), at the scale of a borough, a neighborhood, a street, and even a building courtyard.

Scattered heat islands

The major transformations of the city over the last fifteen years are also represented: the appearance of the tram on the boulevards of the marshals, the redevelopment of the main avenues, the creation of the international Chapel and Rosa Parks districts, to the north, the closure of the platforms. on the right bank of the Seine, to name a few.

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This inventory also emphasizes environmental themes hitherto relegated to the background, even unexplored, but which have now become crucial, the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) having recalled again, this Monday, August 9. When the last overhaul of the PLU, wanted by the team of the former mayor (2001-2014) Bertrand Delanoë in the early 2000s, insisted on the absorption of unsanitary housing, the creation of social housing, the rebalancing between he east and west of the capital, it is the climate crisis that today serves as a common thread.

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