Paris Dreams of a Calmer, Greener Champs Elysées

This week, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, gave the green light for a major makeover of the French capital’s most famous avenue, the Champs Elysées. Promising to turn the 2.3 kilometer stretch from the Place de La Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe into an ‘extraordinary garden’, the city A $ 305 million plan devised by architects PCA-Stream will roughly halve the space for cars, significantly increase the area’s tree cover, and encourage more small-scale stores along the avenue’s flanks.

The project, dubbed “Re-Enchanting the Champs Elysées” and expected to be completed by 2030, is likely to be overdue. While the street still largely retains its international label as the ‘most beautiful avenue in the world’, the Champs Elysées’ reputation among Parisians has been low for a while. Despite its grand buildings and dramatic vistas, the avenue is widely criticized in France for being polluted, congested, pricey and – thanks to brand saturation and busy tourism – even ‘old fashioned,A term that can probably best be translated as ‘passé’.

The current lack of love among locals for the Champs Elysées is an open secret. A 2019 survey found that 30% of Parisians disagreed with the ‘prettiest’ label – a percentage that increased as respondents lived closer to the avenue itself – and 71% rejected the street as ‘touristy’. Even the city recognized in its renovation proposals that the street is currently known as a gathering point for ‘large international chains that are considered antiseptic and hardly distinguishable’.

Most major cities have a dull but popular commercial center with a similar function – New York’s Times Square or Amsterdam’s Leidseplein come to mind. A specific problem with the Champs Elysées, however, is that it is both old fashioned and too expensive to be really accessible. Even domestic brand emporia, such as a huge Louis Vuitton flagship, make the street’s retail offering feel like a very expensive airport. Strollers don’t just come here for shopping, of course, but with a lot of car traffic and large stretches of radiant asphalt, it is also not an ideal place for café terraces.

As a result, the locals stay away. PCA-Stream’s survey of people flows in the area found that once you discounted people working in businesses along the street, only 15% of pedestrians on the Champs Elysées were from Greater Paris.

The new makeover won’t automatically make the street hip, but will certainly make the avenue a more pleasant place to be, much like other greening, car-calming projects that have already been done elsewhere in Paris. Current views (which may still be amenable to later adaptation) show sidewalks roughly doubling in width, while car lanes are reduced to four – even around the Place de L’Étoile, a multi-spoke intersection connecting all the roads that are essential for circulation in northwestern Paris. Generous bike lanes flank both sides, while the remaining vehicles (somewhat optimistic) are depicted as peacefully mingling with pedestrians, suggesting that an as-yet-unannounced speed reduction will also occur. This pedestrian space is shaded by a newly doubled row of trees, and the pavement underneath is partially cleared to create a more rain-absorbing surface.

However, it is at the eastern end of the avenue, in Place de la Corcorde, that the biggest change will take place – a change that, unlike the rest of the project, should take place before the 2024 Olympics. the currently spectacular but rather arid square, stranded behind traffic lines, will be visually reshaped by planting. What is now an enormous stretch of pavers will be filled with shady lawns that stand like a pair of open lips between the fountains of the square. Meanwhile, a main road will be buried at the southern edge of the square, with grass and shrubs. Beautiful views across the square will likely be lost at several points, but the space appears to be more accessible to pedestrians. By connecting existing gardens, it will eventually be possible to walk from the Louvre all the way to the Arc de Triomphe under a leafy cover and breathe cleaner air in a green space dotted with benches and water fountains.

The businesses along the avenue should also need some changes. Public consultation revealed that citizens have a “more authentic and more French shops, “says the city,” with an emphasis on French art of living, expertise and gastronomy ”. Given the popularity of the street with visitors – and high commercial rents that require businesses to have high sales to survive – this directive could run the risk of creating a theme park version of French culture that is in itself could still have old fashioned aspects of it. The desire to make the avenue more of a monument and less of a shopping center nevertheless seems a promising sign.

And yet a calmer, more car-free Champs Elysées can still be a shock. After all, this is a multi-lane through road that traffic has long been part of. Back in the day before cars were widely recognized as harmful, the jumble of Citroëns and Renaults weaving around the Arc de Triomphe was considered a quintessentially Parisian spectacle – proof that city life was loud and dirty, but also dynamic and vibrant. Few might want to keep this scene, but a Champs Elysées without cars will become a remarkably different place – a large axial avenue no longer primarily devoted to movement.

More than a decade ago, a somewhat similar transformation found the intersection of an American metropolis, New York City’s partially car-free Times Square. That still worries some New Yorkers nostalgia for a bygone bustle, and Hidalgo may feel that some Parisians are similarly opposed to banning cars along this boulevard; its multi-year campaign to rid the city of automobile domination has been characterized by such backlash in the past. But if the car-free wave continues – and developments in other European cities, including Brussels and Madrid, suggests it can – more grand urban spaces can look to a less hectic future.