The Paris Olympics were a heavenly party. We were treated to the Grand Palais, a sumptuous legacy of the Belle Époque, as a glass and steel showcase for the fencing and taekwondo competitions; to the Place de la Concorde and its famous obelisk transformed into an urban park for the BMX, breaking and skateboarding events; to the magical Eiffel Tower as a backdrop for the beach volleyball; to the Versailles gardens too, of course, a prodigious palace for the equestrian competitions.
“These were to be the finest Olympic Games of the modern era, in what may well be the most wonderful city in the world,” summarized columnist Bruce Arthur of Toronto Star in his review of the dazzling global gathering. “Like the Olympics themselves, Paris envelops you and, after a while, you begin to wonder what else could possibly be out there.”
We know it: it will be Los Angeles in 2028. After the French dream, this American sequel could turn out to be a nightmare from an aesthetic point of view. Even before the end of Paris 2024, Californian commentators began to despair at the thought of the sets that their empire of the tank (” motordom “) will offer in four years, essentially Walmart parking lots and twenty-lane highways.
“LA is too ugly to host the Olympics,” journalist Jeannette Marantos summed up in the Los Angeles TimesFor her, the message delivered by the surroundings of her city’s airport can be summed up in this formula: “welcome to hell.”
We know the sorry refrain in Montreal where traditional and social media pour out ad nauseam criticism of the city deemed dirty, ugly, always under construction and yet never improved. Returning from a vacation in Japan where trains arrive to the second, columnist Olivier Niquet recounted on the Urbania website that it took him two hours to get home by taxi.
“You know, I’m coming from Rome or Paris,” director Serge Denoncourt said on Radio-Canada radio at the beginning of the summer. “I don’t have the words to tell you how ugly Montreal is. We can’t say crime against humanity, but we’re not far off…” Welcome to another hell?
One for seven
To sum up: Los Angeles is ugly, Montreal is ugly, but Paris is beautiful and even sublime.
What criteria are used to make these judgments of taste?
It is to explore this very profound question that the Parisian architect Alexandre Labasse organized the exhibition The beauty of a city in 2021-2022 at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, which he was then directing. The Arsenal, located in the 4e arrondissement, is the documentation and exhibition center for urban planning in the French capital.
“I created this exhibition precisely to try to define what made a city beautiful, but also to demonstrate that this quality cannot be summed up in the “I like it or I don’t like it” that we hear everywhere,” explains Alexandre Labasse to the Duty in an interview via videoconference. “It’s a bit like the kind of criticism we’ve had on social networks, with the hashtag #SaccageParis, in particular. We tried to move away from subjective assessments to establish objective criteria in order to define what makes a city beautiful.”
The synthesis, also published as a book, is based on the reflections of some sixty connoisseurs, architects, urban planners, artists, historians, landscapers, philosophers and sociologists. With one foot in history, the other in future changes, the Areopagus reached a consensus around seven criteria.
First, the site; from Paris, dominated by the Seine, and Montreal, by the river and the mountain, to LA, marked by the ocean. Then, the morphology, or the balance proposed by the large assembly of new and old buildings in the urban composition. Third, the landscape, that of the pedestrian, who walks the sidewalks and squares, crosses colors, materials, shapes.
The fourth dimension concerns architecture, and the fifth, the place of life, including greenery, which is increasingly crucial in the face of climate change. Then come the practical externalities, including transportation, which make life pleasant, safe and efficient. The last criterion relates to hospitality, or the city’s ability to welcome people.
“The city must be made for those who live there day and night,” continues Mr. Labasse. Paris, a small city of 105 km2it is 2.2 million inhabitants who live there, and 3.6 million inhabitants who come there every day. We asked ourselves the question a lot: how do we let people interact with the city and how do we let them decide on the public space of tomorrow? It is not just a vision that is needed top down which would apply to everyone. In the other direction, we must allow everyone to make the city. This is what the Parisian municipality has been trying to do for about fifteen years.”
Which leads to tensions, of course, and more criticism. Parisians in cars or trucks complain a lot about bicycles. Only, they forget that two thirds of the capital’s inhabitants do not have a car. This non-motorized population is very happy about the removal of 50,000 parking spaces in public spaces in less than two decades. The vast majority (around 80%) of the remaining 800,000 spaces are underground. “Many streets in the capital are no longer congested with cars,” summarizes Mr. Labasse, who asks to “look at the figures objectively.”
In Paris, there is a metro station every 600 meters. A new network under construction in the inner and outer suburbs will add 68 new stations to make the outlying neighborhoods pleasant places to live. By adding the metro, tram and RER lines built between 2020 and 2030 in the Paris metropolitan area, we arrive at 169 new stations. Soon, 98% of Parisians will live less than 2 km from a station, or less than a ten-minute bike ride.
“The number one means of transportation in Paris is still walking,” notes Mr. Labasse. “There are many alternatives to the car. Obviously, it’s a challenge for American cities to evolve in this direction.”
Seven for all
An architect himself, Mr. Labasse chairs the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles and for the past two years has directed the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme, a multidisciplinary structure where some 70 geographers, urban planners, sociologists and architects work. The municipal agency collects data, publishes studies, advises decision-makers and undertakes prospective analyses.
“Of course, Paris has been thinking and planning for a very long time,” says the director. “The great thought that structured the capital as we know it today is the Haussmann phase, which is actually quite short since it lasted from 1853 to 1870. By expanding a little further upstream and pushing to 1900, we encompass more than 60% of Parisian heritage and 60% of Parisian roads. The structure is there, and it is what we saw a lot during the Olympic Games.”
Mr. Labasse experienced the euphoria on site by attending several competitions, which he went to by bike. “These two weeks celebrated more than 15 years of work to make the city more accessible and more mixed,” he summarizes, giving many examples. The 180 km of track at the turn of the century have since been multiplied by six. Public housing and social housing account for a quarter of the housing stock and the objective is to raise this threshold to 30%.
So this is also why Paris is beautiful. What remains to be done to make it even more beautiful? Alexandre Labasse answers that the first challenge focuses on preparing for climate change. “We must continue to de-tarmac. We have planted 150,000 trees in recent years and we need more.” The second area of intervention concerns land to allow the less wealthy to remain Parisians or become so, in order to maintain urban diversity.
The director specifies that the seven criteria targeted by his experts “work for all beautiful cities”. The most beautiful ones are listed in the recurring rankings, where Paris often comes at the top of the list.
“The great mandate of the ancient Greek leaders was to make their city more beautiful,” the architect said in conclusion. “The aesthetic question is fundamental, but it is not based only on formal characteristics. Today, all cities suffer from defects linked to the automobile, which is a difficult parenthesis in their history. In Paris, the automobile arrived in 1905. It is a century and it is not much…”