The image of Paris in many peoples’ minds is often one of a city replete with quaint bustling streets, cute cafes, shops, and restaurants. We can imagine hordes of people strolling along the River Seine, taking in views of the Eiffel Tower under the soft and warm street lamps dotted across the city. This image, maybe something like the image viewed below in Image 1, takes us back to the past. But, this past is also part of the challenge as Paris tries to turn itself into a modern city to meet the future.
Image 1: Parisian Street (credit: Wesley Graybeal)
Put simply, one of the main challenges comes from buildings. An estimated 58% of Parisian buildings were built before World War I, and many of these buildings lack air conditioning, lack elevators, trap excessive heat, and are electrically inefficient. The result? All these old buildings account for 70% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. So, naturally, improving the sustainability of Paris’ housing stock is a key part of Paris’s Net Zero Carbon by 2050 plan. But how will this urban transformation take place? What kinds of changes will need to be made?
One type of change that can be made is simple: building more and building sustainable. That is exactly what Paris has done with its new Clichy Batignolles Eco-District. Located in the northern part of Paris in the 17th arrondissement, this district is a 54-hectare site that reuses and adapts a former rail yard owned by SNCF. This classifies this site as a brownfield development (a development using environmentally contaminated land, or land not previously undeveloped). The main premise of the project was to turn a formerly restricted zone into a dense and sustainable urban community that becomes highly connected to the city, linking neighborhoods and housing 7500 residents while creating 12700 jobs. Essentially, the new Eco-District is a masterpiece in sustainability through its community development initiatives, its carbon neutrality infrastructure, and its landscape architecture.
As for community development initiatives, the envisioning of this district included everyone affected by its construction: developers, future residents, current residents, service providers, and city officials. These communities all participated in the design process of the Eco-District. This allowed for all interests to be met: the public interests of community members – such as what kinds of spaces they needed – as well as the private interests of the developers. This system gave everyone an equal chance to participate in the development of their neighborhood. Because of this cooperation, 70% of the neighborhood’s 3400 new homes are mixed-income social housing or rent controlled, meaning that people of all incomes will have access to the new development. This will generate a strong community, increase economic vitality, and reduce poverty concentration. The method embodies a sustainable and democratic means of urban development that provides a framework showing how future urban development efforts should occur. However, this is not the only aspect of sustainability in which the new Eco-District functioned.
The new district also excels in its carbon neutrality infrastructure. To ensure that 85% of the energy used for heating and hot water is supplied by renewable sources, the project used three key technologies: geothermal heat, solar photovoltaic electricity, and pneumatic waste collection. The geothermal heat system draws hot water from an aquifer far below Paris, heats the water to any specified temperature using heat pumps, and then returns the now colder water to the aquifer far below the surface. The hot water is used to heat buildings in the district. The system can be used in reverse to cool buildings in the summer. It allows for a much more energy efficient system of heating and cooling while also significantly reducing the quantity of the buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions, which mitigates their overall environmental impact.
In addition to geothermal heating, the district uses solar photovoltaic panels to produce electricity. These solar panels are installed on the building rooftops and facades in order to generate electricity that can be used primarily for lighting. Solar energy produces roughly 3,500 MWh of electricity per year – enough to satisfy approximately 40% of the district’s buildings’ annual electricity requirements. The inclusion of solar electricity generation in this district will allow for a significant reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions of the district.
Image 2: New housing in the Clichy Batignolles Eco-District (credit: Wesley Graybeal)
The last element of carbon neutrality infrastructure that the district excels at is its pneumatic waste collection. This system works by integrating the waste collection systems of all the surrounding buildings. Essentially, all household waste is automatically collected in an underground network and sorted later. There is a collection station on the edge of the network where recyclable waste is separated from trash. All in all, a system like this eliminates large and loud garbage trucks that have to crisscross the streets and collect individual garbage cans. This is much more efficient for the community than how waste is usually collected. It saves the district from having to use 10,000 waste trucks per year, saving 1,872km in transport. This method is, for transportation-related emissions, much more sustainable and extremely important for creating a sustainable and efficient community.
The landscape architecture of the district’s buildings and its park, the Martin Luther King Park, are also designed sustainably, which was achieved in the 3 areas of flora, rainwater, and preventing urban heat islands. In terms of flora, the park focuses on giving private green spaces and developing green roofs in order to increase the area’s flora. The spaces have also been designed to create diverse environments with differing species of plants. The infrastructure in the park, including the biotope pond, allows for the reproduction of plant and animal species like water plants, ducks, moorhens, dragonflies, and frogs.
In addition to flora, the district’s landscape architecture also has a focus on managing rainwater. Since impervious surfaces like roofs, streets, and sidewalks do not allow for rainwater to infiltrate into the soil, the park tries to minimize such surfaces with them making up only 12% of the district’s total surface area. Rainwater also recovers into the park’s pond and surplus water is channeled into an underground storage tank. This is important because, when water and sewer systems overflow, the whole area becomes polluted. A key part of a sustainable community includes creating a system to manage rainwater.
Image 3: Martin Luther King Park and surrounding buildings (credit: Wesley Graybeal)
Lastly, the area has a high focus on preventing urban heat islands. Urban areas, with lots of concrete and little trees, are often warmer than surrounding rural areas, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. The eco-district attempts to reduce this effect by acting as an urban “air conditioner.” The shade of the trees and the effect of evapotranspiration – as generated by the park’s greenery – allows for plants and trees to collect much of the surrounding water and transform it into water vapor that cools the surrounding air. This plan allows for sustainability efforts and is specifically designed to reduce the urban heat island effect to mitigate its environmental footprint.
Through a combination of factors, such as community development initiatives, carbon neutral infrastructure like solar panels, geothermal heating, pneumatic waste collection, and landscape architecture, Paris’s new Clichy Batignolles Eco-District provides a useful case study of urban transformation and sustainable urban planning. The district’s efforts to prioritize community development initiatives and urban sustainability best-practices will ensure that the district is not only a sound financial investment for real estate developers, but also a good investment for the city of Paris as a whole. By creating a new district that acts as a public and a private good, the Clichy Batignolles district proves that sustainability is the best option for all. Importantly, the district also serves as a framework that can be used around the world for constructing new sustainable communities that incorporate peoples’ current needs, as well as those of future generations. Lastly, although these buildings might not look exactly like the Paris of our minds – the Paris of the past, they will certainly help bring in a sustainable Paris of the future.