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The Happy City1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Itinerary | Home
For one thing, Parisians have buried the Pompidou with sand, pricked it with parasols and rendered it utterly undrivable with beer gardens, bocce ball courts and potted palm trees. This is not a road anymore, at least not during the summer. It’s a beach playground, all the way from the Louvre to the cast iron arches of the Pont de Sully. They call it Paris Plage. The fashion designer is right. Life is easier here on the beach. But her assessment might just as well be made of most of central Paris. All through the city, pavement has been wrested away from private cars and converted into sandboxes, plazas, dance floors and bike paths. Paris has joined a global movement that seeks to change not just streets but the very soul of urban spaces. Its adherents believe that cities can become engines not just of economic growth. But of happiness. The charge is being led by some of the world’s toughest towns, places like Bogotá, where happiness theory led one mayor to transform roads into parks and pedestrian “freeways,” and Mexico City, whose mayor is investing in urban beaches and bikeways in order to change the citizens’ gloomy outlook. Now the movement is spilling over to wealthier cities too. Seoul has ripped out a downtown freeway to make room for parks and streams. London has put the squeeze on cars with its now famous congestion charge. These measures are often sold as emergency actions to tackle global warming. In fact, changing the way we design and use public space can change the way we move, the way we treat other people and ultimately the way we feel. Now you might think that Paris had long ago figured out the art of urban joy. But in recent years, residents have become so sick of noise, pollution and congestion that they have thrown their support behind a radical plan by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë to reclaim their streets. By 2012, suburban cars will be banned entirely from the city’s core. I have come to test the psychological effects of the latest of the mayor’s schemes. Last year, Delanoë flooded the city core with more than 20,000 bikes, all virtually free to borrow. I swipe my card into a metallic kiosk, silently unlocking one of a dozen bicycles stationed alongside it. This vélo libre (free bike) – Vélib’ for short – will be my personal metro. I can drop it off at any of more than a thousand kiosks around the city core. I toss my briefcase into the front basket, then commit what would once have been a suicidal act: I roll out into the Paris traffic. Taxis bounce past me along Rue de Rivoli like go-karts. Delivery trucks and motorbikes jostle frenetically. Bus engines suck at the warm air. I have steeled myself for the pathological aggression of Paris’ drivers. But I soon realize that there are other cyclists in this stream, dozens of us, in fact. Our collective mass has a calming effect on the traffic. I feel intensely awake but not in danger. In this chaos, we are all looking to each other for clues. We make eye contact. This is just one example of the alchemy occurring on Paris’ streets, explains sociologist Bruno Marzloff when I meet him in the 8e arrondissement. “We are learning a new way of sharing the city,” Marzloff tells me as we wander the back streets. Sockless in loafers, he moves through the throngs with studied precision. “Look at what happens on a crowded sidewalk; everyone must be aware or we smash into each other. We must choreograph our movements. The result is a kind of dance.”
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