Abstract
“Grand Paris” is a study carried out by ten teams of researchers and city planners in the aim of putting forward general guidelines for Paris urban area’s evolution by 2030. All the teams suggest making the area “greener” in some way, to combat climate warming by CO2 sequestration. Our team also shows that extending the nearby forests by 30 %, favouring short farm-to-consumer circuits and using lighter coloured building materials will decrease the urban heat island, reducing the mortality during heat waves as well as the need for air-conditioning. These results lead us to reverse the way of thinking urban planning: the geographic and natural aspects should replace the urban infrastructure as a driver for planning urban development. This new strategy allows city changes on quite a large scale, that will have a favourable impact in terms of economics, leisure activities, greenhouse gas emissions and the local microclimate.
Highlights
The goal of this interdisciplinary study is to show how city planning changes, wide-reaching and realistic, can be thought out in advance to respond to a variety of aims: landscape, environment for daily life, creation of new economic activities, attenuation of and adaptation to climate change.Such interdisciplinary cooperation is a challenge: are the themes considered very diverse but, above all, the scales to be tackled are not at all the usual ones
City planners work on a district or the setting up of a public transport route
Global warming is “very probably” due to greenhouse gas emissions related to human activities (IPCC/WG1 2007; Meinshausen et al 2009)
Summary
The goal of this interdisciplinary study is to show how city planning changes, wide-reaching and realistic, can be thought out in advance to respond to a variety of aims: landscape, environment for daily life, creation of new economic activities, attenuation of and adaptation to climate change. Such interdisciplinary cooperation is a challenge: are the themes considered very diverse but, above all, the scales to be tackled are not at all the usual ones. Y. Lion Ateliers Lion associés / Architects - Urban Planners - Landscapers, 29 bis rue Didot, 75014 Paris, France. Climatic Change (2013) 117:769–782 connection with climate change is even newer: will it be possible, on the scale of a human lifetime, to have an effect on the climate via city planning?
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