THE PARIS PLAN

The cyclists pedaling up to a cobbled square on Paris’ Left Bank looked like any group of friends
enjoying a Sunday afternoon ride in late June. But this was no casual outing. To them, it was a
revolution in the making. From one bike hopped a slight dark-haired woman in a Chicago Cubs
windbreaker: Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. Unclipping her bike helmet, she told journalists
gathered there that the French capital needed to drastically cut car use – the key message on
the campaign trail for her re-election on June 28. “We are getting there,” she said, “but we
have long way to go.”
Hidalgo is hardly alone among city leaders in trying to transform urban life. Across the U.S. and
Europe and even in the megalopolis of Istanbul, mayors have pledged to create millions of acres
of new parkland, finance companies’ switches to solar-powered electricity, retrofit buildings
and ban private cars from inner-city districts, all in an effort to cut carbon footprints and rein in
pollution.
Their efforts could not be more urgent. It was national leaders who signed the Paris
agreement, a 2015 global climate pact on carbon emissions. However, it is the cities, where
most of the world’s population lives, that must figure out how to meet those targets. While
cities occupy just 2% of the earth’s surface, they consume 78% of the world’s energy and
produce more than 60% of its entire carbon emissions, according to U.N. statistics. “Cities are a
relic of the industrial age,” says Richard Florida, an urban specialist at the University of Toronto.
“They have to be redesigned to be healthier and safer.”
The eerie silence that fell over the world’s cities during months of lockdown helped reinforce
that message, says Hidalgo, sitting in her vast wood-paneled office in Paris’ city hall two days
after clinching a second six-year term. “We could breathe. We heard birds,” she says. “It was
not real life. People were afraid,” she adds, in a nod to the nearly 30,000 French killed by the
coronavirus. “But nonetheless”, we thought, “If it could be like this, how pleasant it would be.”
The years since Hidalgo came to office in 2014 have been anything but pleasant for Paris, from
the devastating terrorist attacks of 2015 to the calamitous fire in Notre Dame Cathedral last
year. Yet even as tragedies struck, she kept rolling out plans to transform her city into a
greener and more people-friendly place. Her ambitions have won her plaudits from the green
lobby but also the ire of drivers and other Parisians.
Hidalgo’s most controversial act has been to create about 870 miles of bike lanes that now
crisscross Paris, a plan she intends to vastly expand. In the process, Hidalgo has eliminated
thousands of parking spaces and shut several key roads entirely to car traffic. This includes the
road on the northern bank of the Seine River, which for years allowed drivers to zip across the
city in minutes; now it is reserved for pedestrians. From 2024, diesel cars will be banned from
Paris. Meanwhile, engineers have mapped the city’s buildings according to their energy
efficiency, the mayor says, and so far have retrofitted about 50,000 of them with better
insulation and ventilation. Hidalgo has also loosened rigid building codes, allowing residents,
for example, to plant trees in neighbourhoods - an act that previously required overcoming
steep bureaucratic hurdles.
Globally, Hidalgo has also been one of the most visible city executives on climate change since
her city hosted the COP 21 summit, when the Paris Agreement was signed, in 2015. Until late
last year, she was the rotating Chair of C40, an organization of large cities founded in 2005 to
coordinate local climate policies. The group has emerged as a crucial network for city leaders
trying to roll out environmental initiatives, especially in countries – like the US – where federal
officials offer little help. “We are pretty much on our own,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney told
TIME at a C40 meeting in Copenhagen last October, referring to American mayors. “We can
have a big impact, but we cannot do it all.” The sense of sharing a green foxhole has forged a
bond among mayors that has held through the pandemic. One of the first calls Hidalgo
received after her re-election victory was from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who succeeded
her as head of C40.
The group convened online in May to discuss how to reshape their cities in the wake of the
coronavirus pandemic, and many mayors are already beginning to take action. Giuseppe Sala,
mayor of Milan, has proposed 22 miles of new bike lanes, telling a reporter, “People are ready
to change attitude.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan increased the tolls for driving into the inner
city.
Hidalgo has also seized the moment. As millions of Parisians languished indoors, the city quietly
turned another 31 miles of road into bike lanes and named them corona pistes, or “corona
lanes.” By the time the city reopened, in mid-May, residents found that cars were no longer
allowed on the main east-west artery, Rue de Rivoli. Now you can cycle or scoot through the
commercial heart of Paris, from the Louvre Museum to the Bastille Square, in minutes. Handily
for the bike-loving Mayor, the bike lane cuts straight past city hall. “I often go by bike from my
home to city hall, and there are no cars, just bikes and pedestrians,” Hidalgo says. “All of a
sudden there is this silent space.”
Now that she has won re-election, she is thinking of new ways to transform the urban
environment. One key concept is the “15-minute city,” crafted by one of Hidalgo’s consultants,
Carlos Moreno, a professor of innovation at the Sorbonne University in Paris. The idea is to
develop infrastructure, enabling residents to access services like public transportation, stores
and schools, all within a quarter hour walk from home. “We’ve seen through the COVID
pandemic that it’s possible to work differently, to create new hubs,” Moreno says. “I am
optimistic.”
Not all Parisians feel so upbeat about the changes. The morning after I met Hidalgo in her
office, thousands of drivers working for Uber and other private taxi companies converged on
Paris’ Boulevard Raspail, a major road cutting through the Left Bank, in an enraged
demonstration against the mayor’s anti-car program. For hours, they parked their cars across
two lanes along several miles of the four-lane boulevard, honking their horns. “We have 2,500
drivers demonstrating, all because of Mme. Hidalgo,” fumed Anthony, 53, at the post-election
protest against Hidalgo; he runs his own private taxi service and declined to give his last name.
“This is not a matter of being for the environment or against the environment. Look, we are
driving electric cars! He said, pointing at some of the vehicles.
And yet increasingly, voters are on the side of the environmentalists. The June 28 elections saw
France’s green party called EELV, win mayorships in major cities like Lyon, Bordeaux and
Strasbourg. Hidalgo also owed her victory in some measure to an election alliance with the
greens. Green parties also won nearly 10% of the seats in the European Parliament last year, as
well as about 20% of votes in Germany’s local elections, with many voters saying that climate
change was now their biggest worry. Hidalgo says she is not surprised. “I have seen this
coming for a long time,” she says. “The preoccupation around the environment among
residents is very, very strong in all the big cities of the world. It is really the No.1 subject.
Beyond the current crisis, Hidalgo has her eyes set on July 2024, when the Olympic Games are
scheduled to kick off in Paris. Hidalgo says she envisions a city finally transformed through the
Olympics. A string of riverside public pools, purpose-built for the Summer Games, will become
permanent fixtures, with the Seine cleaned and swimmable. The immigrant-heavy town of
Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris – one of the poorest areas in France – will see a building
boom, with an eco-friendly Olympic Village and Media City and the Olympic aquatic center all
located there. Electrified rapid transit will be expanded across the capital. And despite the
steep Olympic budget for the city of about $8 billion, Hidalgo is determined to adhere to
environmental principles; she nixed a € 100 million ($112 million) sponsorship deal with the
French oil giant Total and has banned the fossil-fuel industry from being involved. “The Games
will be a very, very important motor to transform the city,” she says.
If her prediction proves correct, Parisians will soon be living in a much leafier city, and with far
more quiet-even with the honking from drivers protesting Hidalgo’s ideas.