Stimulated by criticisms, the town hall establishes a new “urban grammar” to improve the beauty of the capital.
by and
It will soon be finished from the most common Parisian trash can, the oblong and openwork that had drawn by the architect and designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte in the early 2010s. Gradually, the 21,877 copies, installed between 2013 And 2016 on the sidewalks of the capital, will be replaced by others, existing or to choose. “When this model had been chosen, in 2010, all the elected officials would have preferred another, but it cost four times cheaper,” recalls Emmanuel Grégoire, the first assistant of Anne Hidalgo, in charge of town planning. Now, in use, “this trash can no longer suit us: it is often twisted, damaged, and is not immune to rats or horn”.
At the hatch, therefore, the Bagatelle trash can, but also the immense pots of rotated flowers, the simplest wooden planters, the mobile stainless steel fountains of the totem type, the glass newspapers in glass and stainless steel designed by André Schuch, or the Sanisettes Decaux. In total, around twenty usual objects from the Parisian streets are preparing to disappear from the landscape. Deleted by the town hall of Paris. This is announced by Emmanuel Grégoire, Tuesday June 14.
For a year and a half, the first assistant and his team have been working on the beauty of Paris. It was first a question of establishing a precise inventory of some 1.3 million objects dispersed in the Parisian public space, from display panels to Wallace fountains, passing by foggers, candelabras, plates streets, books of books or even the 332,000 posts preventing cars from parking on the sidewalks. This census carried out, the objective is now to eliminate the ugliest, the most disputed objects, to unclutter and give more unit to the urban landscape. Such a big sorting had not been launched since Jacques Chirac, in 1991. At the time, elected officials passed in particular against the countless telephone booths.
major political subject
The issue is not only aesthetic. For the past two years, the beauty of the capital has become a major political subject. Anne Hidalgo found herself under the cross shot of the right, led by Rachida Dati, and unhappy inhabitants gathered under the hashtag #SaccageParis. After having shouted at the Cabal, the socialist mayor ended up admitting the reality of most of the thousands of cases listed by #SaccageParis of flower bins transformed into dumping grounds, dangerous crossroads, dry fountains, etc. “Even if these criticisms are often excessive, they have spurred on us and stimulated to go faster, admits Emmanuel Grégoire. Which irritates #SaccageParis irritates us too.”
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