18 ms·

Paris Mayor: It's Time for a '15-Minute City'

218 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

keiferski 7y ago
Paris needs to go one step further and remodel itself so that residents can have all their needs met—be they for work, shopping, health, or culture—within 15 minutes of their own doorstep. As someone that has spent a lot of time living in Paris, this is already pretty much true, at least within the Périphérique. The main issue in my experience is the lack of green space; there are surprisingly few parks in Paris.
- _eLRIC 7y ago
  Because Paris is really small and the large parks are just outside Paris : Bois de Vincennes & Bois de Boulogne are each at least twice the size of Central Park I hope you didn't miss Parc de Buttes Chaumont, Parc Montsouris & my favourite : Cimetière du Père Lachaise (yes, a cemetery ... I recommend going at spring and enjoy how green it is)
  - keiferski 7y ago
    Yes yes, I have been to all of those and lived right next to Buttes-Chaumont. But the city in general always felt like it lacked green space. Especially if you make a large circle around Opéra - for 2-3km you really don’t have anything that isn’t small or full of people. That said - Buttes-Chaumont and Le Jardin du Palais Royale are some of my favorite urban parks in the world.
    - _eLRIC 7y ago
      You're right, you'll have to take the metro to get to one. And with the increase of the price / square meter, I'm not sure we'll get larger green space in the future at least in Paris itself
    - throwaway744678 7y ago
      Les Tuileries are less than 1km from the Opera. Parc Monceau is 2km away.
      - keiferski 7y ago
        Les Tuileries is not really a peaceful park, probably because it’s right next to the Louvre. It’s more like an open field.
      - fredoliveira 7y ago
        I was there 4 days ago. It is far from green. Sure, it's an open space without buildings and has a few trees. It is not, however, a green space.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Current mayor had big plans to turn large roundabouts at the city border into new green areas for pedestrians (since she wants few cars all around)
- megablast 7y ago
  And the parks they do have are not green. Mainly ruble. It does have two fantastic huge parks on the outskirts though, Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.
roel_v 7y ago
At the same time, there is a 30m2 (323 sqft) Parisian apartment for sale for e1.2mm (USD 1.3mm). Not sure these things are quite compatible...
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  At 1% interests rate, that's e12.000 a year, e1000 a month. Not bad.
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Is it 1% interest rate over there?
    - stevesimmons 7y ago
      Yes, in Eurozone countries, 10 year fixed mortgage are typically 0.99%. It's amazingly cheap. Down from 3.5% ten years ago. The downside of low rates is house prices correspondingly very high.
      - rsynnott 7y ago
        Except here in Ireland, unfortunately; absolute lowest mortgage available is 2.3%. Repossession is especially difficult here, which raises the risk for the lender, and the banks unwisely gave out ECB trackers (as opposed to the EURIBOR trackers more common elsewhere) back in the day; some of these can be as low as 0.5%, so everyone else has to pay for that legacy.
    - patrickk 7y ago
      Yes, in Germany for example. Some cities are experiencing drastically rising housing costs as a result. There was a bank in Denmark (not in the Eurozone) offering negative rate mortgages. In reality the bank tacked on fees so they weren’t paying people to take out a mortgage!
  - eschutte2 7y ago
    Check that math
Animats 7y ago
More convenience stores will be needed. Ones with longer hours.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Do Parisian convenience stores close at night? Chinese urban convenience stores don't; even here in the American suburbs CVS is open 24 hours, and so is Safeway.
  - hans1729 7y ago
    >"even here in America" Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? 24h-stores seem like an inherently american concept to me (I'm german, so France is right around the corner)
    - 2019-nCoV 7y ago
      The US 24h culture pales in comparison to that of East Asia.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? Well, you might notice that even though you put two different sets of quotation marks on it, the text you're attributing to me isn't what I wrote. It's "even" because I'm contrasting an urban environment, where 24-hour stores are a baseline expectation, with a suburban environment, where they aren't but we have them anyway.
      - hans1729 7y ago
        My bad, that was inappropriate. That being said: I wouldn't call them a baseline expectation in urban environments. I live in a city of 250k people, and I don't think we have a 24h-store here.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      When it comes to opening times of stores, us Germans are way behind everybody else...
Proziam 7y ago
I wonder how many more jobs are needed to make this possible. You'd need more of everything, plus longer/staggered open hours (who decides what hours make the most sense, for which districts?). On the plus side, you'd have more convenience and less need for vehicle transit. On the potentially negative side, how many of these jobs would realistically pay a living wage?
- jmnicolas 7y ago
  She's just a politician trying to get reelected, don't expect too much out of this.
  - jackjeff 7y ago
    Most of Paris is basically like that already, and was before she was even mayor. Promising to the happy few who can live in Paris at 15mins while commuters from outside need >= 1hr. Turns out commuters don’t vote.
- SomewhatLikely 7y ago
  Not if you squeezed everyone into a smaller area.
discordance 7y ago
I lived in Japan for a few years and I felt like they’ve nailed this concept. Everyone I knew across different parts of Tokyo lived within a 10 min walk of a supermarket, school, nursery, doctor, train station etc. It worked really well.
- _nalply 7y ago
  and greenery and work?
- Hamuko 7y ago
  10 minute walk away from a supermarket only gets you so far when you spend an hour in one direction commuting since you probably go to work more often than you go grocery shopping.
  - muzani 7y ago
    I spent 3 hours grocery shopping today. I spend 3 hours total commuting to work every weekday. I'd still be ecstatic if I can get food within a 30 minute walk. I went so far as to try to run a startup around this. It's possibly why there's so many food delivery startups; this is a big hit to quality of life.
  - laurieg 7y ago
    Interestingly, daily grocery shopping is not uncommon in Japan. Probably down to supermarkets being close and kitchens being small.
tlear 7y ago
I am curious if the pickpockets still run rampant all over the tourist areas and subway. Few years back in 3 days: 1. Dad ran into undercover cop who on subway who told him to watch his stuff better :o 2. Got his phone stolen next day on subway, I guess cop was right 3. I witnessed the typical distract, grab and run.. good thing someone threw trip and got the runner to drop his prize 4. Had to deal with 3-4 typical: “please sign this petition while my partner tries to come up from behind and snatch your crap thing”. The East European scowl and choice mat solved it
- atoav 7y ago
  Americans must be deluxe targets, never had any of this happen to me in the times I had been to Paris (am from Austria).
  - amatecha 7y ago
    Yeah if you speak English with an American or Canadian accent you are a prime target for sure. The ppl giving fake surveys were picking us out from SO far away (I was purposely watching for it after our first trip there).
    - ritonlajoie 7y ago
      Yeah if you have a tee shirt 'I love Paris' you will have a bad time
- amatecha 7y ago
  Yup, family member's passport was stolen last year. Every time I visit Paris some attempt of some kind occurs. Fake "survey", someone "bumps into me by accident" (nice try, scumbag), guy very avidly eyeing my wife's purse, etc. etc.. It's super frustrating.
  - getlawgdon 7y ago
    Sadly this is my experience too. traveled many places throughout the world and Paris is the only place I've had things stolen twice.
hestefisk 7y ago
This is essentially Copenhagen but at 5-7x (?) scale. Very cool.
xyzzyz 7y ago
They should first figure out how to make average worker spend less than one 55 minutes commuting by public transit each way. https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-year-on-public-transport https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y...
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  That's pretty much exactly what they're trying to do.
  - reyqn 7y ago
    And that's not feasible. You can't just reduce the average commuting time to work by 40 minutes magically
    - the_french 7y ago
      The city / region has been working on that by decentralizing major government and business institutions. By pushing them out of the core in to neighboring suburbs it allows those employees a real chance at living near work in more than 15m2. At the end of the day the only real solution to commutes / crowding is going to be spreading the load out on more communes and cities.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jasonkester 7y ago
In contrast, I’ve always considered Los Angeles to be a “45 Minute City”, but by car. Everything you need is a 45 minute drive from wherever you are now. The beach is 45 minutes away. It’s 45 minutes to work. Your friends are each about 45 minutes away, in different directions, and the downtown bar you meet at on Friday night is 45 minutes away. You can even get out into the mountains on angel crest highway in about 45 minutes. But unless you want a CVS pharmacy or a Starbucks, nothing is close by. Ever.
- keiferski 7y ago
  And then there’s NYC - The $20 City. Any time you step outside of your apartment, you’ll inevitably spend $20 on something.
  - Toenex 7y ago
    And Manchester (UK) the 10mm city. Every time you step outside you will absorb at least 10mm of water.
    - Entalpi 7y ago
      Stockholm is the ”next island” city. You live on one island and everything else is one another island.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    $20 per hour at least.
- currymj 7y ago
  it feels like many places have a property like this. i think it must be some combination of the way things get built around roads + transit development, and induced demand.
- gfxgirl 7y ago
  When i lived there it was 20 minutes everywhere. Now between 3pm and 7pm it can easily be 2-3hrs. A few years ago visiting I made the mistake of trying to from Santa Monica at 4:30 pm to Alhambra. Took 3 hours. The ride back was 30 mins My mom who still lives there said she was on the freeway for 5 hours (2in, 3out) from Temecula to Pasadena and back. With no traffic it would have been 1hr each way.
carlob 7y ago
> In Paris, this isn’t necessarily such a tall order. The mayor oversees only the 2.2 million residents of the city’s heavily populated historic core, which already enjoys some of the use-mixing that the 15-minute-city concept encourages, thanks to its pre-industrial roots. This is the main problem of Paris and of Hidalgo. For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city, yet only 2 get to vote for the 'real' mayor, those who live outside the historic center are fragmented into a bunch of smaller counties and are also generally poorer than 'real' Parisians. When Hidalgo banned cars on the quays, Parisians were very happy, while commuters from other counties had to add some time to their commute and were furious. Look at this [0] plot, see how the green line stopped tracking the blue one? That's your problem... [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Croissance_population_Paris.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Croissan...
- seaal 7y ago
  For anyone interested in the linked chart labeled in English: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Paris_Historical_Population.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Paris_Hi...
- antpls 7y ago
  From the article : "In her re-election campaign, Mayor Anne Hidalgo says that every Paris resident should be able to meet their essential needs within a short walk or bike ride." "Paris" is defined as Paris intra-muros + the Boulogne and Vincenne parks, which are limited in space and was saturated long time ago. You are a "Paris resident" if you live inside of the City of Paris (the green line of the plot). The chart is showing "Aire urbaine" and "Unité urbaine" which are another way to draw geographical limits and are only used for statistical purposes, and they include the "Region of Paris", or "Ile de France". Obviously, the region is expanding like any other capital's region in the world, so that plot exactly shows nothing. The sentence "For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city" is fake news. People living inside of the City of Paris are asking to be able to use bikes or other transport means, but all the cars coming from outside of Paris everyday are making it difficult. Stop confusing the Region of Paris and the City of Paris. People living inside the City of Paris (the Parisians) have right to elect a mayor who will defend them. If you live in one of the adjacent cities, go elect a mayor that will locally improve your quality of life, but (real) Parisians are sick of the traffic inside their city and no other city has right to decide for them.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
I am interested in what the tipping point of density is - it is something I think Strong Towns idea has right but there are several factors (actual physical density of homes is key, but planning laws / zones matters, as does disposable income and actual physical built stock). I would also ask if new cities (China, India) what their planning / zoning priorities are?
pmontra 7y ago
I live in Milan, 3/4 distance from the very center, and it's basically like that. I've got 4 supermarkets in 10 minutes walking range, metro station at 3 minutes, some healthcare within 5 minutes (but no ER), countless shops. Cinema and theaters at 30 minutes by metro. I'm self employed and working mostly from home so it's a very good experience. I didn't enjoy it as much when I wasn't self employed. I've been working on the other side of the city for many years, about 1 hour either by car or by public transport. Where one works makes all the difference but (this is a tangent) also how one works. I've been working at 10 minutes from my home for a couple of years and it didn't feel much different. I was confined in my office all the day long. It's the normal experience for most of us but it would feel like living in a prison now.
d--b 7y ago
It’s all an election stunt to try and justify that her war on cars won’t affect Parisians. Ie. If you have everything you need in a 15min walk, you shouldn’t suffer that the traffic is reduced. But the things you occasionally need are getting harder to get. Plumbers, electricians don’t want to come to the city anymore. They will facture in the awful traffic and the fines they get for the lack of parking space. Basically no one will come to your apartment for less than 500€. There potentially are business opportunities there.
- _Microft 7y ago
  Does Paris not issue parking permits to craftsmen? German cities offer special parking permits to businesses that need to have unwieldy or heavy gear with them at their customer's place. The yearly fee is in the low hundreds (maybe 250€ even in the larger cities) and usually includes free parking and that even in places where most people normally would not be allowed to park at all, e.g. on Anwohnerparkplätzen (residential parking spaces where one would normally need a permit only available to people living in that street). It might even allow to enter pedestrian areas in some cities.
  - hbbio 7y ago
    > Does Paris not issue parking permits to craftsmen? No
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      I heard it was free.. odd.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Yes, Paris has similar permits. Not free, though. But the issue is not that but lack of parking space. A permit only allows them to park in actual parking spaces. Most of the time there aren't any available...
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  If everyone can get to what they need within 15 minutes, traffic as a whole would be greatly reduced
pi-err 7y ago
I live in Paris and whatever you think of the current mayor, this is pure marketing babble for the elections next month. Paris has always had this very dense city core where 99% of daily life is 5-10’ away. It’s a great concept for dense metropoles, but it only works because the city is so small: 100 square kilometers in an ocean of much lesser density. 80% of “Greater Parisians” live outside Paris itself. Unfortunately there is no actual representations for 80% of those “outside Parisians” since they are split between hundreds of small cities with individual political dynamics. Pure game theory as local governance.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  I agree with you and if there was a survey of problems (at the municipal level) the inhabitants think of as priority, the walkability of the city would probably not be their main priority (which, as noted, is good).
  - hk__2 7y ago
    > I agree with you and if there was a survey of problems (at the municipal level) the inhabitants think of as priority, the walkability of the city would probably not be their main priority (which, as noted, is good). There is a survey at the municipal level called the “Budget Participatif”, where inhabitants can suggest and vote for projects that’ll then be executed by the city. These projects represent 5% of the annual city budget. There have been so many projects about pedestrian areas in 2018 that they decided to remove the whole category in 2019 not to be overwhelm by the quantity of new projects and have time to do the previous ones. If that shows one thing, it’s that the walkability of the city is a main priority.
- peignoir 7y ago
  +1 The elections are coming soon and the current mayor is just doubling down on promesses (while Paris is great on paper the past couple of years did feel like chaos from my point of view)
  - yardie 7y ago
olivierduval 7y ago
With Hidalgo, Paris is becoming more and more an "Elysium" movie city-model: only a few decide Parisian of what will piss off everybody else. Remember the end of the movie ? ;-) Btw... Elysium and Elysée - the Palace of the French President... in Paris - have the same root. If it can help to understand...
- olivierduval 7y ago
  I would be happy to know why some people downvoted my comment, just to understand. I live 100m from Paris, in the suburb, so I'm a bit concerned (and knowledgable) about this subject. And the current - and maybe next - Paris mayor is only working for her own electorate (logical). Problem is: Paris is a central city/region. You can't just "live around it". So basically when Hidalgo close the "quais de seine", it's fine for people living in Paris or tourists but it's a PITA for people from one suburb to the other one. When Hidalgo wants to shutdown the "periphique", it won't matter to parisians and tourists in Paris, but will make a really big difference for people working and living outside Paris for whom crossing Paris is the shortest way. BTW, 90min from work to home is not really unusual in Paris suburb, and I would be the happiest man on earth if I could had just 30 min between work and home. Moreover, Paris is becoming more and more a car-adverse city (nowhere to park, except for a lot of money) but public transportation are far from compensating this (for example: still no public transportation all night long... except one saturday night every month on a few lines... as an experiment). So: no cars, not enough public transportations, and a central town (by design and history).
esotericn 7y ago
This seems possible in many major metropolitan areas, with the significant caveat that in order to live it most would need their wealth to be unlinked from their earned income. Zone 1 and most parts of Zone 2 London close to stations are like this. I've just looked it up out of interest and it makes me feel fairly privileged! My flat has supermarkets, restaurants, a pharmacy, a bookshop, banks, a library, museums, one of the biggest parks in London, a hospital, schools, multiple tube stations, a GP, a dentist, etc etc within 15 minutes walk (actually I think 10 minutes). But not everyone (in fact, barely anyone) can afford to live in those areas. Even if they could afford it in the sense of having the income to spend a ton of people choose to live further out and have such things as freehold homes, gardens, etc.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Yeah I think you nailed it with the idea of people wanting to live further out to get more space. Dense urban living is fun when you are energetic (and probably young and probably single and probably with lots of like-minded friends) and you spend 95% of your time working and socializing, and you basically just use your home as somewhere to sleep and get washed in between the office and the bars/restaurants/gyms/etc However, this is not the same for everyone. I dream of the day when I can live in a house with its own garden and where I am not physically sharing walls with other people's homes. At least in London you won't get that anywhere near your work unless you are absurdly wealthy.
ThePhysicist 7y ago
That's essentially the concept of many cities in Europe. I live in Berlin for example and I have almost everything I need within 10 minutes of walking or 5 minutes of cycling: Supermarkets, pharmacies, doctors, restaurants, electronics stores, schools, kindergardens, ... The downside is that you tend to become used to your small microcosm ("Kiez" we call it) and rarely leave it. I can't recall for example when I went to East Berlin the last time, as distances can still be large and it can take one hour in public transit to go from East to West, depending of course where you want to go. I also lived in Paris for more than 3 years and it also has great walkability, more so than Berlin even because the city center is much more compact (you can cross it by bike from North to south in 30-40 minutes I'd say). The metro is also super efficient, you can get everywhere "intra muros" in 30-40 minutes. If you live outside of the center of Paris (which I also did for a while) it's less ideal though, as the public transportation quickly becomes much more sparse and you will need a car to get around easily. As most people in the Paris region actually live in those areas I'd say there's still much work to be done there.
- ansible 7y ago
  > The metro is also super efficient, you can get everywhere "intra muros" in 30-40 minutes. Yes. Both times I was there visiting, we didn't bother with even the buses. The Metro was usually a short walk, and a short wait.
  - yardie 7y ago
    The metro is like elementary school. You’re a professional when you can hack the metro and buses and get anywhere in <30min. While m pretty god with the former my spouse, who prefers the buses, can get to any part of the city with the least amount of walking.
- __Joker 7y ago
  I think most of the world lives pretty close except the US. But problem in rest of the world is not that you can't have schools, clinics, entertainment, shopping in a 15 minutes radius but the problem is finding the desired combination when you throw in you and your spouse workplace and the school to which you want to send to your children to.
ScarZy 7y ago
It's quite refreshing to ensure that there's a push for this for the most part on HN, which is a rather affluent community. I'm not sure about the state of housing here too, but I am willing to wager that we live, for the most part, in a high density area. Working to have all of our expectations for a good life walkable, scootable, or bikeable is the way we should be designing our cities.
rdsubhas 7y ago
This is utterly, completely dependent on the demographics of the neighborhood, which is way more harder to change than zoning.
carlchenet 7y ago
The center of Paris is something like 13-14k€/square meter... The truth is Parisians with average revenues (for Parisians, not for French people) more and more live close to the suburbs (13th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 20th districts) around Paris and the center is full of company's head office, shops and restaurants. So the picture displayed in the article should figure inhabitations on the outside skirts and accommodations in the center. At the national level, Parisians are an average really rich population and living inside Paris will continue to grow more and more difficult because living in Paris is nowadays a luxury. And nothing will change this situation in a close future.
uinerkrj 7y ago
Cities are terrible places to live. To prove my point, can you walk to a natural area (beach, forest, mountain, etc) within 15 minutes? Of course not, other than maybe a tiny manicured park full of people. That "green area" pictured in the diagram will be the only green area, it will be a flat park of some sort, and it will be your only choice of place to visit. It will be more like a museum for trees than any kind of natural habitat. That doesn't meet anybodies "needs". This is all just dressing up ways to reduce the costs of humans. Governments are just a collection of large companies (their controllers), who run the world the same as if it is a business. The citizens of the city are a cost, and these are marketing campaigns to get them to accept cost reduction measures. Also, as I am getting downvoted, I may as well point out that Paris itself is an especially terrible place to live. In fact, I don't know many parisians that live there, and I have never met anybody that likes it. HN obsession with density and walking is hilarious.
- dghf 7y ago
  > To prove my point, can you walk to a natural area (beach, forest, mountain, etc) within 15 minutes? Edinburgh has, less than a mile from its centre, Holyrood Park [0], 650 acres of wild highland landscape, including gorse, glens, ridges, hills, cliffs, two natural springs, three lochs, and an 800-foot high extinct volcano. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyrood_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyrood_Park
- rsynnott 7y ago
  I mean, it’s all down to personal preference, really. I’d hate to live somewhere where I couldn’t walk or get around by rapid public transport. Car oriented suburbs (or, worse, rural areas) are my idea of hell. And if I want to go to a mountain or a beach (which is something I want to do way less than, say, going to work or the supermarket or going for a drink with friends, all of which are walking distance) I can get on a train. Mind you, this is a city of 1.5 million people; mega cities like Paris have their own challenges.
tsukurimashou 7y ago
Now find a way for people to actually afford living in Paris, so they can reach things within 15 minutes, a lot of people live outside Paris and work inside Paris, resulting commute times of 2 to 4 hours a day.
todd8 7y ago
I had traveled to Paris a number of times and decided to take a drive across parts of France. Armed with a classic Michelin guide book, I rented a car at one of the train stations in central Paris. My plan was to simply drive and stop every evening around 5:30pm using the guide book to find a place to stay. I was quite surprised that I ended up still in greater Paris on the first evening. Between stopping to eat, taking photos, and navigating (pre-GPS), I was still in Paris the first night. Paris is a huge, and lovely, city. As an aside, it was a great trip. I simply drove south for around 8 days and picked a different route to drive north back to Paris to fly home. I stumbled across so many interesting places, the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne, the dramatic village of Rocamadour located on a cliff, and many other memorable places.

218 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

Paris needs to go one step further and remodel itself so that residents can have all their needs met—be they for work, shopping, health, or culture—within 15 minutes of their own doorstep. As someone that has spent a lot of time living in Paris, this is already pretty much true, at least within the Périphérique. The main issue in my experience is the lack of green space; there are surprisingly few parks in Paris.

_eLRIC 7y ago
Because Paris is really small and the large parks are just outside Paris : Bois de Vincennes & Bois de Boulogne are each at least twice the size of Central Park I hope you didn't miss Parc de Buttes Chaumont, Parc Montsouris & my favourite : Cimetière du Père Lachaise (yes, a cemetery ... I recommend going at spring and enjoy how green it is)
- keiferski 7y ago
  Yes yes, I have been to all of those and lived right next to Buttes-Chaumont. But the city in general always felt like it lacked green space. Especially if you make a large circle around Opéra - for 2-3km you really don’t have anything that isn’t small or full of people. That said - Buttes-Chaumont and Le Jardin du Palais Royale are some of my favorite urban parks in the world.
  - _eLRIC 7y ago
    You're right, you'll have to take the metro to get to one. And with the increase of the price / square meter, I'm not sure we'll get larger green space in the future at least in Paris itself
  - throwaway744678 7y ago
    Les Tuileries are less than 1km from the Opera. Parc Monceau is 2km away.
    - keiferski 7y ago
      Les Tuileries is not really a peaceful park, probably because it’s right next to the Louvre. It’s more like an open field.
    - fredoliveira 7y ago
      I was there 4 days ago. It is far from green. Sure, it's an open space without buildings and has a few trees. It is not, however, a green space.
agumonkey 7y ago
Current mayor had big plans to turn large roundabouts at the city border into new green areas for pedestrians (since she wants few cars all around)
megablast 7y ago
And the parks they do have are not green. Mainly ruble. It does have two fantastic huge parks on the outskirts though, Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.

roel_v 7y ago

At the same time, there is a 30m2 (323 sqft) Parisian apartment for sale for e1.2mm (USD 1.3mm). Not sure these things are quite compatible...

toohotatopic 7y ago
At 1% interests rate, that's e12.000 a year, e1000 a month. Not bad.
- tehlike 7y ago
  Is it 1% interest rate over there?
  - stevesimmons 7y ago
    Yes, in Eurozone countries, 10 year fixed mortgage are typically 0.99%. It's amazingly cheap. Down from 3.5% ten years ago. The downside of low rates is house prices correspondingly very high.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      Except here in Ireland, unfortunately; absolute lowest mortgage available is 2.3%. Repossession is especially difficult here, which raises the risk for the lender, and the banks unwisely gave out ECB trackers (as opposed to the EURIBOR trackers more common elsewhere) back in the day; some of these can be as low as 0.5%, so everyone else has to pay for that legacy.
  - patrickk 7y ago
    Yes, in Germany for example. Some cities are experiencing drastically rising housing costs as a result. There was a bank in Denmark (not in the Eurozone) offering negative rate mortgages. In reality the bank tacked on fees so they weren’t paying people to take out a mortgage!
- eschutte2 7y ago
  Check that math

Animats 7y ago

More convenience stores will be needed. Ones with longer hours.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
Do Parisian convenience stores close at night? Chinese urban convenience stores don't; even here in the American suburbs CVS is open 24 hours, and so is Safeway.
- hans1729 7y ago
  >"even here in America" Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? 24h-stores seem like an inherently american concept to me (I'm german, so France is right around the corner)
  - 2019-nCoV 7y ago
    The US 24h culture pales in comparison to that of East Asia.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? Well, you might notice that even though you put two different sets of quotation marks on it, the text you're attributing to me isn't what I wrote. It's "even" because I'm contrasting an urban environment, where 24-hour stores are a baseline expectation, with a suburban environment, where they aren't but we have them anyway.
    - hans1729 7y ago
      My bad, that was inappropriate. That being said: I wouldn't call them a baseline expectation in urban environments. I live in a city of 250k people, and I don't think we have a 24h-store here.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    When it comes to opening times of stores, us Germans are way behind everybody else...

Proziam 7y ago

I wonder how many more jobs are needed to make this possible. You'd need more of everything, plus longer/staggered open hours (who decides what hours make the most sense, for which districts?). On the plus side, you'd have more convenience and less need for vehicle transit. On the potentially negative side, how many of these jobs would realistically pay a living wage?

jmnicolas 7y ago
She's just a politician trying to get reelected, don't expect too much out of this.
- jackjeff 7y ago
  Most of Paris is basically like that already, and was before she was even mayor. Promising to the happy few who can live in Paris at 15mins while commuters from outside need >= 1hr. Turns out commuters don’t vote.
SomewhatLikely 7y ago
Not if you squeezed everyone into a smaller area.

discordance 7y ago

I lived in Japan for a few years and I felt like they’ve nailed this concept. Everyone I knew across different parts of Tokyo lived within a 10 min walk of a supermarket, school, nursery, doctor, train station etc. It worked really well.

_nalply 7y ago
and greenery and work?
Hamuko 7y ago
10 minute walk away from a supermarket only gets you so far when you spend an hour in one direction commuting since you probably go to work more often than you go grocery shopping.
- muzani 7y ago
  I spent 3 hours grocery shopping today. I spend 3 hours total commuting to work every weekday. I'd still be ecstatic if I can get food within a 30 minute walk. I went so far as to try to run a startup around this. It's possibly why there's so many food delivery startups; this is a big hit to quality of life.
- laurieg 7y ago
  Interestingly, daily grocery shopping is not uncommon in Japan. Probably down to supermarkets being close and kitchens being small.

tlear 7y ago

I am curious if the pickpockets still run rampant all over the tourist areas and subway. Few years back in 3 days: 1. Dad ran into undercover cop who on subway who told him to watch his stuff better :o 2. Got his phone stolen next day on subway, I guess cop was right 3. I witnessed the typical distract, grab and run.. good thing someone threw trip and got the runner to drop his prize 4. Had to deal with 3-4 typical: “please sign this petition while my partner tries to come up from behind and snatch your crap thing”. The East European scowl and choice mat solved it

atoav 7y ago
Americans must be deluxe targets, never had any of this happen to me in the times I had been to Paris (am from Austria).
- amatecha 7y ago
  Yeah if you speak English with an American or Canadian accent you are a prime target for sure. The ppl giving fake surveys were picking us out from SO far away (I was purposely watching for it after our first trip there).
  - ritonlajoie 7y ago
    Yeah if you have a tee shirt 'I love Paris' you will have a bad time
amatecha 7y ago
Yup, family member's passport was stolen last year. Every time I visit Paris some attempt of some kind occurs. Fake "survey", someone "bumps into me by accident" (nice try, scumbag), guy very avidly eyeing my wife's purse, etc. etc.. It's super frustrating.
- getlawgdon 7y ago
  Sadly this is my experience too. traveled many places throughout the world and Paris is the only place I've had things stolen twice.

hestefisk 7y ago

This is essentially Copenhagen but at 5-7x (?) scale. Very cool.

xyzzyz 7y ago

They should first figure out how to make average worker spend less than one 55 minutes commuting by public transit each way. https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-year-on-public-transport https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y...

mikro2nd 7y ago
That's pretty much exactly what they're trying to do.
- reyqn 7y ago
  And that's not feasible. You can't just reduce the average commuting time to work by 40 minutes magically
  - the_french 7y ago
    The city / region has been working on that by decentralizing major government and business institutions. By pushing them out of the core in to neighboring suburbs it allows those employees a real chance at living near work in more than 15m2. At the end of the day the only real solution to commutes / crowding is going to be spreading the load out on more communes and cities.

deleted 7y ago

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jasonkester 7y ago

In contrast, I’ve always considered Los Angeles to be a “45 Minute City”, but by car. Everything you need is a 45 minute drive from wherever you are now. The beach is 45 minutes away. It’s 45 minutes to work. Your friends are each about 45 minutes away, in different directions, and the downtown bar you meet at on Friday night is 45 minutes away. You can even get out into the mountains on angel crest highway in about 45 minutes. But unless you want a CVS pharmacy or a Starbucks, nothing is close by. Ever.

keiferski 7y ago
And then there’s NYC - The $20 City. Any time you step outside of your apartment, you’ll inevitably spend $20 on something.
- Toenex 7y ago
  And Manchester (UK) the 10mm city. Every time you step outside you will absorb at least 10mm of water.
  - Entalpi 7y ago
    Stockholm is the ”next island” city. You live on one island and everything else is one another island.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  $20 per hour at least.
currymj 7y ago
it feels like many places have a property like this. i think it must be some combination of the way things get built around roads + transit development, and induced demand.
gfxgirl 7y ago
When i lived there it was 20 minutes everywhere. Now between 3pm and 7pm it can easily be 2-3hrs. A few years ago visiting I made the mistake of trying to from Santa Monica at 4:30 pm to Alhambra. Took 3 hours. The ride back was 30 mins My mom who still lives there said she was on the freeway for 5 hours (2in, 3out) from Temecula to Pasadena and back. With no traffic it would have been 1hr each way.

carlob 7y ago

> In Paris, this isn’t necessarily such a tall order. The mayor oversees only the 2.2 million residents of the city’s heavily populated historic core, which already enjoys some of the use-mixing that the 15-minute-city concept encourages, thanks to its pre-industrial roots. This is the main problem of Paris and of Hidalgo. For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city, yet only 2 get to vote for the 'real' mayor, those who live outside the historic center are fragmented into a bunch of smaller counties and are also generally poorer than 'real' Parisians. When Hidalgo banned cars on the quays, Parisians were very happy, while commuters from other counties had to add some time to their commute and were furious. Look at this [0] plot, see how the green line stopped tracking the blue one? That's your problem... [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Croissance_population_Paris.PNG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Croissan...

seaal 7y ago
For anyone interested in the linked chart labeled in English: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Paris_Historical_Population.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Paris_Hi...
antpls 7y ago
From the article : "In her re-election campaign, Mayor Anne Hidalgo says that every Paris resident should be able to meet their essential needs within a short walk or bike ride." "Paris" is defined as Paris intra-muros + the Boulogne and Vincenne parks, which are limited in space and was saturated long time ago. You are a "Paris resident" if you live inside of the City of Paris (the green line of the plot). The chart is showing "Aire urbaine" and "Unité urbaine" which are another way to draw geographical limits and are only used for statistical purposes, and they include the "Region of Paris", or "Ile de France". Obviously, the region is expanding like any other capital's region in the world, so that plot exactly shows nothing. The sentence "For most practical purposes Paris is a 10 million inhabitants city" is fake news. People living inside of the City of Paris are asking to be able to use bikes or other transport means, but all the cars coming from outside of Paris everyday are making it difficult. Stop confusing the Region of Paris and the City of Paris. People living inside the City of Paris (the Parisians) have right to elect a mayor who will defend them. If you live in one of the adjacent cities, go elect a mayor that will locally improve your quality of life, but (real) Parisians are sick of the traffic inside their city and no other city has right to decide for them.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

I am interested in what the tipping point of density is - it is something I think Strong Towns idea has right but there are several factors (actual physical density of homes is key, but planning laws / zones matters, as does disposable income and actual physical built stock). I would also ask if new cities (China, India) what their planning / zoning priorities are?

pmontra 7y ago

I live in Milan, 3/4 distance from the very center, and it's basically like that. I've got 4 supermarkets in 10 minutes walking range, metro station at 3 minutes, some healthcare within 5 minutes (but no ER), countless shops. Cinema and theaters at 30 minutes by metro. I'm self employed and working mostly from home so it's a very good experience. I didn't enjoy it as much when I wasn't self employed. I've been working on the other side of the city for many years, about 1 hour either by car or by public transport. Where one works makes all the difference but (this is a tangent) also how one works. I've been working at 10 minutes from my home for a couple of years and it didn't feel much different. I was confined in my office all the day long. It's the normal experience for most of us but it would feel like living in a prison now.

d--b 7y ago

It’s all an election stunt to try and justify that her war on cars won’t affect Parisians. Ie. If you have everything you need in a 15min walk, you shouldn’t suffer that the traffic is reduced. But the things you occasionally need are getting harder to get. Plumbers, electricians don’t want to come to the city anymore. They will facture in the awful traffic and the fines they get for the lack of parking space. Basically no one will come to your apartment for less than 500€. There potentially are business opportunities there.

_Microft 7y ago
Does Paris not issue parking permits to craftsmen? German cities offer special parking permits to businesses that need to have unwieldy or heavy gear with them at their customer's place. The yearly fee is in the low hundreds (maybe 250€ even in the larger cities) and usually includes free parking and that even in places where most people normally would not be allowed to park at all, e.g. on Anwohnerparkplätzen (residential parking spaces where one would normally need a permit only available to people living in that street). It might even allow to enter pedestrian areas in some cities.
- hbbio 7y ago
  > Does Paris not issue parking permits to craftsmen? No
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I heard it was free.. odd.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Yes, Paris has similar permits. Not free, though. But the issue is not that but lack of parking space. A permit only allows them to park in actual parking spaces. Most of the time there aren't any available...
gnopgnip 7y ago
If everyone can get to what they need within 15 minutes, traffic as a whole would be greatly reduced

pi-err 7y ago

I live in Paris and whatever you think of the current mayor, this is pure marketing babble for the elections next month. Paris has always had this very dense city core where 99% of daily life is 5-10’ away. It’s a great concept for dense metropoles, but it only works because the city is so small: 100 square kilometers in an ocean of much lesser density. 80% of “Greater Parisians” live outside Paris itself. Unfortunately there is no actual representations for 80% of those “outside Parisians” since they are split between hundreds of small cities with individual political dynamics. Pure game theory as local governance.

raverbashing 7y ago
I agree with you and if there was a survey of problems (at the municipal level) the inhabitants think of as priority, the walkability of the city would probably not be their main priority (which, as noted, is good).
- hk__2 7y ago
  > I agree with you and if there was a survey of problems (at the municipal level) the inhabitants think of as priority, the walkability of the city would probably not be their main priority (which, as noted, is good). There is a survey at the municipal level called the “Budget Participatif”, where inhabitants can suggest and vote for projects that’ll then be executed by the city. These projects represent 5% of the annual city budget. There have been so many projects about pedestrian areas in 2018 that they decided to remove the whole category in 2019 not to be overwhelm by the quantity of new projects and have time to do the previous ones. If that shows one thing, it’s that the walkability of the city is a main priority.
peignoir 7y ago
+1 The elections are coming soon and the current mayor is just doubling down on promesses (while Paris is great on paper the past couple of years did feel like chaos from my point of view)
- yardie 7y ago

olivierduval 7y ago

With Hidalgo, Paris is becoming more and more an "Elysium" movie city-model: only a few decide Parisian of what will piss off everybody else. Remember the end of the movie ? ;-) Btw... Elysium and Elysée - the Palace of the French President... in Paris - have the same root. If it can help to understand...

olivierduval 7y ago
I would be happy to know why some people downvoted my comment, just to understand. I live 100m from Paris, in the suburb, so I'm a bit concerned (and knowledgable) about this subject. And the current - and maybe next - Paris mayor is only working for her own electorate (logical). Problem is: Paris is a central city/region. You can't just "live around it". So basically when Hidalgo close the "quais de seine", it's fine for people living in Paris or tourists but it's a PITA for people from one suburb to the other one. When Hidalgo wants to shutdown the "periphique", it won't matter to parisians and tourists in Paris, but will make a really big difference for people working and living outside Paris for whom crossing Paris is the shortest way. BTW, 90min from work to home is not really unusual in Paris suburb, and I would be the happiest man on earth if I could had just 30 min between work and home. Moreover, Paris is becoming more and more a car-adverse city (nowhere to park, except for a lot of money) but public transportation are far from compensating this (for example: still no public transportation all night long... except one saturday night every month on a few lines... as an experiment). So: no cars, not enough public transportations, and a central town (by design and history).

esotericn 7y ago

This seems possible in many major metropolitan areas, with the significant caveat that in order to live it most would need their wealth to be unlinked from their earned income. Zone 1 and most parts of Zone 2 London close to stations are like this. I've just looked it up out of interest and it makes me feel fairly privileged! My flat has supermarkets, restaurants, a pharmacy, a bookshop, banks, a library, museums, one of the biggest parks in London, a hospital, schools, multiple tube stations, a GP, a dentist, etc etc within 15 minutes walk (actually I think 10 minutes). But not everyone (in fact, barely anyone) can afford to live in those areas. Even if they could afford it in the sense of having the income to spend a ton of people choose to live further out and have such things as freehold homes, gardens, etc.

mattlondon 7y ago
Yeah I think you nailed it with the idea of people wanting to live further out to get more space. Dense urban living is fun when you are energetic (and probably young and probably single and probably with lots of like-minded friends) and you spend 95% of your time working and socializing, and you basically just use your home as somewhere to sleep and get washed in between the office and the bars/restaurants/gyms/etc However, this is not the same for everyone. I dream of the day when I can live in a house with its own garden and where I am not physically sharing walls with other people's homes. At least in London you won't get that anywhere near your work unless you are absurdly wealthy.

ThePhysicist 7y ago

That's essentially the concept of many cities in Europe. I live in Berlin for example and I have almost everything I need within 10 minutes of walking or 5 minutes of cycling: Supermarkets, pharmacies, doctors, restaurants, electronics stores, schools, kindergardens, ... The downside is that you tend to become used to your small microcosm ("Kiez" we call it) and rarely leave it. I can't recall for example when I went to East Berlin the last time, as distances can still be large and it can take one hour in public transit to go from East to West, depending of course where you want to go. I also lived in Paris for more than 3 years and it also has great walkability, more so than Berlin even because the city center is much more compact (you can cross it by bike from North to south in 30-40 minutes I'd say). The metro is also super efficient, you can get everywhere "intra muros" in 30-40 minutes. If you live outside of the center of Paris (which I also did for a while) it's less ideal though, as the public transportation quickly becomes much more sparse and you will need a car to get around easily. As most people in the Paris region actually live in those areas I'd say there's still much work to be done there.

ansible 7y ago
> The metro is also super efficient, you can get everywhere "intra muros" in 30-40 minutes. Yes. Both times I was there visiting, we didn't bother with even the buses. The Metro was usually a short walk, and a short wait.
- yardie 7y ago
  The metro is like elementary school. You’re a professional when you can hack the metro and buses and get anywhere in <30min. While m pretty god with the former my spouse, who prefers the buses, can get to any part of the city with the least amount of walking.
__Joker 7y ago
I think most of the world lives pretty close except the US. But problem in rest of the world is not that you can't have schools, clinics, entertainment, shopping in a 15 minutes radius but the problem is finding the desired combination when you throw in you and your spouse workplace and the school to which you want to send to your children to.

ScarZy 7y ago

It's quite refreshing to ensure that there's a push for this for the most part on HN, which is a rather affluent community. I'm not sure about the state of housing here too, but I am willing to wager that we live, for the most part, in a high density area. Working to have all of our expectations for a good life walkable, scootable, or bikeable is the way we should be designing our cities.

rdsubhas 7y ago

This is utterly, completely dependent on the demographics of the neighborhood, which is way more harder to change than zoning.

carlchenet 7y ago

The center of Paris is something like 13-14k€/square meter... The truth is Parisians with average revenues (for Parisians, not for French people) more and more live close to the suburbs (13th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 20th districts) around Paris and the center is full of company's head office, shops and restaurants. So the picture displayed in the article should figure inhabitations on the outside skirts and accommodations in the center. At the national level, Parisians are an average really rich population and living inside Paris will continue to grow more and more difficult because living in Paris is nowadays a luxury. And nothing will change this situation in a close future.

uinerkrj 7y ago

Cities are terrible places to live. To prove my point, can you walk to a natural area (beach, forest, mountain, etc) within 15 minutes? Of course not, other than maybe a tiny manicured park full of people. That "green area" pictured in the diagram will be the only green area, it will be a flat park of some sort, and it will be your only choice of place to visit. It will be more like a museum for trees than any kind of natural habitat. That doesn't meet anybodies "needs". This is all just dressing up ways to reduce the costs of humans. Governments are just a collection of large companies (their controllers), who run the world the same as if it is a business. The citizens of the city are a cost, and these are marketing campaigns to get them to accept cost reduction measures. Also, as I am getting downvoted, I may as well point out that Paris itself is an especially terrible place to live. In fact, I don't know many parisians that live there, and I have never met anybody that likes it. HN obsession with density and walking is hilarious.

dghf 7y ago
> To prove my point, can you walk to a natural area (beach, forest, mountain, etc) within 15 minutes? Edinburgh has, less than a mile from its centre, Holyrood Park [0], 650 acres of wild highland landscape, including gorse, glens, ridges, hills, cliffs, two natural springs, three lochs, and an 800-foot high extinct volcano. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyrood_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holyrood_Park
rsynnott 7y ago
I mean, it’s all down to personal preference, really. I’d hate to live somewhere where I couldn’t walk or get around by rapid public transport. Car oriented suburbs (or, worse, rural areas) are my idea of hell. And if I want to go to a mountain or a beach (which is something I want to do way less than, say, going to work or the supermarket or going for a drink with friends, all of which are walking distance) I can get on a train. Mind you, this is a city of 1.5 million people; mega cities like Paris have their own challenges.

tsukurimashou 7y ago

Now find a way for people to actually afford living in Paris, so they can reach things within 15 minutes, a lot of people live outside Paris and work inside Paris, resulting commute times of 2 to 4 hours a day.

todd8 7y ago

I had traveled to Paris a number of times and decided to take a drive across parts of France. Armed with a classic Michelin guide book, I rented a car at one of the train stations in central Paris. My plan was to simply drive and stop every evening around 5:30pm using the guide book to find a place to stay. I was quite surprised that I ended up still in greater Paris on the first evening. Between stopping to eat, taking photos, and navigating (pre-GPS), I was still in Paris the first night. Paris is a huge, and lovely, city. As an aside, it was a great trip. I simply drove south for around 8 days and picked a different route to drive north back to Paris to fly home. I stumbled across so many interesting places, the prehistoric caves of the Dordogne, the dramatic village of Rocamadour located on a cliff, and many other memorable places.