paris part 1: la urbanisme

[twoeleven]

these are views of paris that don't involve faster, higher, or stronger.

let's start where we did, on rue de la roquette, in the 11th district, on the east side.

our hotel had a photogenic staircase:



views from our 6th-floor balcony:

looking southwest, towards place de la bastille:



looking northeast:



and straight down:





the balcony reminded me of the good parts of living in hyde park, chicago: we used share a huge second-floor apartment with a bunch of friends, and it had a much larger balcony. so, when we wanted to interact with people on the street, we'd sit on the balcony where we could see and be seen. and if we didn't want to, we could hide further back in the apartment. the apartment was long and thin, like a shotgun shack, so unless we were in the front room, we couldn't hear street noise.

this hotel room was too high to really talk to people outside, and the balcony was odd: too big to be just a juliet balcony, but not big enough to really enjoy sitting outside on. i think it was only a half meter wide, so the chairs and tiny table filled it.

rue de le roquette has lots of restaurants and cafes, with apartments and hotels above them. these views are all looking northeast, starting from place de la bastille, and going up the street from there.





sunset over rue de la roquette:



the masque of the red pipe:



and what would paris be without pastries? these are from a place called bon and bo, which is very much worth the prices they charge (about $8 each):





we wandered some of the nearby streets. this is a sign asking for donations to house homeless kids:



(60,000 homeless children, 1,600 street kids)

as with transportation, americans have these odd beliefs about europe's wealth and poverty. apparently, europe is some sort of cradle-to-grave socialist society, where the few hard-working taxpayers are utterly crushed by the burden of paying for medial care and free food for the lazy bums. or perhaps fairies provide social services and nobody works. or something like those, depending on one's politics.

in reality, it's neither. it's less screwed up than the US, but there's homelessness and other need. in vienna, the summer before last, somebody had convinced a restaurant to help him raise money for medical care for his son, who had some rare disease. i have photos of the posters, with the restaurant offering a euro for every fancy drink people ordered.

but back to urbanism:

we wandered down to a garden and collection of museums across the seine. there's a park stretching from place de la bastille to the river, with some sort of bottlebrush tree:



and the gardens themselves:



the local pigeons have expressed their opinion of lamarck's fantasies about evolution. (the french will never credit darwin.)





the bastille metro station has markers for the prison that was once there:





other things:

we saw the thing:



and the other thing:



so, like, we've done paris now, right? we can check it off the list?

the broader view from centre pompidou shows typical paris urbanism: six to seven story buildings, residential over the commercial. (i've heard the claim that "mixed use" residential over commercial doesn't exist in the US. it's rare, but there's some in newark, delaware and in chicago, and probably other places. i'm pretty sure there's some in manhattan, for example.)



chicago, famously, is mostly three stories tall, because there's a law that any building over that height needs an elevator (no new york style six-floor walk-ups). there's not much between three stories and ten stories tall, since it doesn't pay to put in elevators in medium-size buildings. so it's a short city, studded with tall buildings. the height difference shows clearly in population density:

chicago: 12,000 people/square mile
paris: 20,000 people/square mile

most of the difference between paris having exactly twice chicago's population density is the loop, which is all skyscrapers. they're mostly office towers, but there are plenty of huge high-rise apartments and condos. wakipedia gives the loop's population density as 27,000 people/square mile.

a couple of random photos:

a nice building:



whoever f. potin was, he had money and taste. the embellishments are a bit rococo for my tastes, but the basic design is pleasing.

a street named after some science guy:

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

About 20 years ago, Seattle mandated that all new commercial building construction in the city must be mixed use. Although a lot of the newer construction is pretty ugly, the overall impact on housing density in the city is great.

Doesn't San Francisco also have a height restriction?

[twoeleven]

i'm not sure all new construction needs to be mixed-use -- rue de la roquette was loud pretty late into the evening -- but it seems to make sense for commercial areas. i prefer my residental areas to be quiet after dark.

[rebeccmeister]

This applies to *commercial* construction in Seattle, not residential. I see it as a relatively modest zoning reform, in a country where zoning laws are a complete and utter mess, and all over the board depending on location (see, e.g., "We don't do no zoning" Houston building houses in its floodplains, vs NIMBYs all over, etc etc, whee!).

[twoeleven]

ah, ok! so much for reading comprehension this morning...

i have been amused reading about the poison pill california put into the laws allowing NIMBYs to stop growth in their areas.¹ In short, if a city/county doesn't build enough housing to meet demand, developers can do what they want to meet the need.

So hoity-toity neighborhoods of single-family mcmansions are sprouting manhattaneqse high-rises. This doesn't solve all of california's problems, but it's caused a lot NIMBYs to reconsider their "no nothing nowhere" approach to growth and development.

1: maybe "poison pill" is the wrong term, since everybody knew the requirement was there, and the cities and counties assured the legislature that they were mature enough to handle the problem...

[twoeleven]

i think i should say that i'm not all for density for its own sake. chicago was dense enough for me, but manhattan is far too dense to be considered sensible urban design. paris was bearable because most of the residents had departed, either on their usual vacations or because of the olympics. (everybody expected the olympics would be a chaotic mess, and were pleasantly surprised when it wasn't.)

[rebeccmeister]

I do find Paris to be a bit much, in terms of overall size and density. Same goes for Seoul, and London. Visits are fine but I'm not sure I'd want to live there. Definitely not in Manhattan.

I really liked how city blocks were structured in Copenhagen, with internal courtyards, so there was quiet and fresh air on one side of things. There are some neighborhoods in Paris that have that, and Parisian suburbs still have pretty good transit and access to everything, making them more pleasant than American suburbs by a long shot.

So, to no one's surprise, I'd favor Nordic cities over most else.

[twoeleven]

There are some neighborhoods in Paris that have that

yeah. i was looking for those, but i think the only one i saw was near the pompidou. in the skyline picture from there, the block of buildings on the right edge of the frame seems have an internal courtyard.

chicago houses and apartments typically back up to alleys, but because of the width of the city blocks, the "alley" includes open space around it. behind the apartment we lived in, there was sufficient open space that there were mature trees, and the area looked like suburban back yards.

[rebeccmeister]

My issue with alleys is that people seem to love to run garbage trucks up and down them constantly.

This neighborhood in Paris is particularly fun: https://flic.kr/p/2p29dLj

[twoeleven]

well, sure: getting rid of the garbage is one of the things alleys are for. i don't remember the noise, which suggests that the odd trash truck going by wasn't so bad. IIRC, apartment buildings in chicago have to contract trash collection, so it may have been that all the landlords hired the same company to do the whole block.