Paris bulletin 3 2013

I’d say that most visitors to Paris, especially those who come back again and again - and they must be counted in the hundreds of thousands - have ‘their Paris’. It’s that kind of city. Reconnecting with ‘your Paris’ may mean sitting on a particular cafe terrasse with a cafe crème or a coup de rouge in front of you, revisiting the street where you stayed as a student, buying a bag of dark red cherries at the marché and eating them on a bench in the Luxembourg, walking from X to Y like you did last year, and the year before that, seeing what’s new, what’s not.

The Paris most visitors know and love probably lies somewhere within a notional ‘centre’ of the city, more often in the low-number arrondissements than in the high ones like the 18^th, 19^th or 20^th, although Belleville and the Buttes Chaumont have their afficionados and some of Montmartre is in the 18^th. And now that the 19^th arrondissement has added the 104 to its attractions - surely the liveliest, most boundary-stretching arts centre in the whole city – parts of the north are perhaps beginning to feel a little less ‘beyond the pale’ than they used to.

Have you thought though, about exploring the 17^th and that part of the 17^th which is en plein développement? Clichy-Batignolles is a quartier to watch, and to visit. It has one of the newest and most imaginatively laid-out parks in Paris, the Parc Clichy-Batignolles Martin Luther-King, once an industrial site, now 5 hectares of greenery, wild life and water – and 5 more to be planted and landscaped by 2017.

                                               

                   

The area was originally destined to be used as the Olympic Village, before Paris lost out to London for the 2012 Games. I don’t suppose anyone would talk about the legacy of not getting the Games, but that’s what this park is, and a very fine legacy too, with skate ramps, sports and play areas as well as quiet green spaces, used by thousands of families from all over the city. It’s easy to find. Catch the metro line 13 going north and get off at Brochant.

The quartier Clichy-Batignolles is transforming itself in other ways. Building has already begun on what was a huge railway marshalling yard. 3,400 new homes will be created (50% of them ‘logements sociaux’), and a vast amount of new office space, including the new Palais de Justice.

The waste generated by all these new residents/workers will be managed by Propreté de Paris (the municipal cleansing department) and a private partner, using a state-of-the-art rubbish and recycling system. I’m talking about ‘la collecte pneumatique’. It involves sucking the rubbish down underground tubes which vomit it out into wagons stationed at the gare St Lazare. From there it is taken by train to the recycling depots so reducing both pollution and congestion on the roads.

By no stretch of the imagination can Paris be described as a role model for sustainable development – yet. There are many northern European cities using pneumatic collection and even more revolutionary, eco-friendly ways of managing domestic and industrial rubbish. But Paris is gradually waking up to the need to get greener: the velib bikes, the electric cars which are proving so popular, the separate recycling and non-recycling bins on every street corner and the relentless campaigning by the Mairie to get the streets cleaner and quieter.

It’s a shame though, that this capital, many of whose citizens have kept their links with the countryside, is proving so slow to embrace composting or greening the city at the humble, domestic level. It would be so easy for people just to grow more stuff, more flowers, herbs and shrubs, on their window ledges and in their courtyards. And think of the increase in bird and insect life that would bring...

I’ll round off this bulletin back at one of the traditional centres of Paris cultural life however, specifically at the centre Pompidou. I have never been able to muster much enthusiasm for Salvador Dali but I am evidently in the minority. The exhibition of his work that has been showing for the past few months at the Centre Pompidou is opening round the clock this weekend – vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre – to try to meet the demand. It closes on 25^th March. When I was last at the Beaubourg, to take a look at the Eileen Gray exhibition, the queue for Dali stretched all the way along the 5^th-floor corridor and people who’d managed to get that far were being told they still had a couple of hours to wait before they’d be inside, in the temple itself.

Soit dit en passant that the Eileen Gray exhibition is well worth a visit  - a little video of her talking in her posh English accent (Anglo-Irish aristo, lived in Paris most of  her adult life), about her introduction to lacquer work and her collaboration with Sugawara-san. A pleasure to watch.