Adventures in Paris’ 12th Arrondissement: School Streets, Car-Free Spaces & More Green Plazas

After giving us an awesome interview about School Streets, City of Paris Urban Planner Priscilla Benedetti offered to take me on a tour of the 12th arrondissement and since I had some time before my next meet up I happily agreed. What she showed me in the next hour or so blew my mind away – not only due to the quality of the transformations but also the speed at which Paris is doing things.

And this is only a small section of the arrondissement, remember citywide Paris is undertaking big changes to its streets both physically but also policies! Nothing was more than a mile away from the school street I filmed her at (a small tease to our next Streetfilm is given at the head of the film).

If you think your city cannot do it due to funds, that is simply not the case. All cities can re-prioritize safer places for people and do this kind of work – it just takes the “will” and “guts” like Gil Penalosa loves to say!

So this street is basically the phase one of our program uh School streets so basically when we come and talk to the people of the neighborhood about the fact that we want to close their streets most of the time they’re scared about like what the the traffic is going to

React to this uh closure so what we offer is that basically a phase one we just say that we will put like fences all around like The Pedestrian area to close it uh we see how does it live if it create a lot of problem in the

Neighborhood and then if it work we do the proper designing of the street that you know where everything is like flat and clear and with more trees and more uh more Greenery here is an example of the program gardening Paris or adopt a tree so basically the tree in Paris uh

Made with this metal thing at the end and basically you can ask the municipality of cares to adopt one of those triing so basically the service will come and cut a square of concrete around the trees and then you will be able to Garden it the way you want so

Here you have an example of someone that is investing a lot of time in the SP he just adopted so here we are still in the 12 plus s mono uh 6 months ago here was a place uh with cars were passing by so nobody was actually really using this

Space you can see a picture here of the space with uh the car that we’re passing all there with like the concrete plots and here we decide to remove everything to plant a lot of trees people can actually now stay more here and actually there is a school on the other side and

That bring you to the park so this is a nice way from the metro to the park that you can go with your kids so here we are in the neighborhood of En your neighborhood where we receive all the ideas that people wanted in the neighborhood and basically people wanted

This street to be more pacified so what we did in the middle of the street we did this uh part that is only for bus uh taxi and police for example when you come from both side it make you go back on the Main Street if they don’t

Actually there there is a camera uh that can read your numbers and actually you will receive a fine at home Okay so this is also part of the program enhance your neighborhood in the 12 District so basically uh the municipality wanted like a place uh in the heart of the district that would gather people and have place to like meet and have a coffee with like a large

Ter and everything and Shadow with the trees what they asked us to do was to check all the traffic maps around this uh thing that was before a roundabout so basically before all the car were coming here turning around and go back to another street so what we did is that we

Close one part of the street there totally pedestrians this place are only for buses so they’re the only one that can cross and then we try for for every Street to plant trees to make like bigger sidewalk so here we are in the 12 AR still where the municipality is very

Ambitious on like developing bicycle closes closing streets and everything so here is an example where before the streets was a two line uh Street for cars basically all this was for cars and the municipality decide to close it and to make it upper and for bicycle only so

Basically all the cars that you can see that come from the other side they have to use the big streets before it was a very uh useful way for cars to go there through the exit of Caris and since we CL this it’s way more difficult so this

Helped the cyclist and also reduce the car by changing the traffic Maps so this this is one of the streets that we could not close because of um a line of buses that was actually using the streets so what we could do as the minimum was to make the space for cars more narrow for cars to reduce their

Speed uh to create a bicycle lane for cont flow to extend the sidewalk on both sides to plant some trees and here also to create a little um Square where people have more space basically you can see like one year ago it was like that

So you had one line going there and one line going there so we Clos all this line we did like a line here and all this space became pedestrian so that’s what we’re looking at right here exactly wow