Faced with the controversy caused by the redevelopment project of the Eiffel Tower district, the Paris City Hall has promised to save the centenary trees and plant 227 new.
Le Monde with AFP
The announcement of the slaughter of around twenty trees, some of whom are very old, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower has aroused the ire of associations and personalities. A sling that forced the Paris town hall to clarify the project.
“No centenary tree will be shot dead,” assured Emmanuel Grégoire (Socialist Party, PS), first deputy of Mayor Anne Hidalgo (PS), Saturday April 30. He sought to turn off the fire on since the mid -week by opponents of the redevelopment project of the Eiffel Tower district.
According to the declarations of the entourage of Mr. Grégoire to the agency France-Presse (AFP), this promise is worth for “two centenary trees” for which the town hall “will find a solution”. For the others, “the goal is to reduce the number of trees killed to the maximum”, specifies the same source, stressing that the town hall had already “succeeded in lowering the figure” from 42 to 22.
The creation of luggage for visitors
Anne Hidalgo has made the capital’s greening a major objective of its second mandate, with the promises of planting 170,000 additional trees or creating five “urban forests” and four new parks.
In the place of these trees, the “One” project, which aims to green and pedestrianize the world famous perspective ranging from Trocadéro to the “Iron Lady”, plans luggage for visitors and premises for employees, semi-buried buildings.
But also 227 new planted trees, argues the entourage of Mr. Grégoire, town planning assistant. The project as a whole must allow the creation of 1.6 hectare of green spaces, still insists the town hall.
a petition to denounce this slaughter
Not enough to calm the opponents: a petition launched on the Change.org site, and relayed by the host Nagui, the journalist Hugo Clément or the old patron of Medef Laurence Parisot had exceeded at the end of after- noon the 30,000 signatories.
“They create vegetation, but they destroy a lot”, deplores Philippe Khayat, member of the association SOS Paris for whom, in addition to the slaughtered trees, two plane trees “more than centenary” will be “weakened” and Ultimately “condemned” by building a “1.5 meter” building of them.
This project also embarrasses environmentalists, who had allowed its adoption in February in exchange for a moratorium on the repair of Champ-de-Mars. The elected representative of Europe Ecologie-les Verts (EELV) Aminata Niakate, who had carried this “difficult balance” for her group, always believes “that no argument holds up” to justify the luggage, which a site could accommodate neighbor.
A few days earlier, the France Nature Environnement Paris association, followed by the national trees surveillance group, had denounced the slaughter of 77 trees in the East Parisian, Porte de Montreuil, object of another large Town hall redevelopment project.