Earth Equity News

Sarkozy's Daring Design Dreams For a New 'Post-Kyoto' Paris. By Susan Sachs, CSMonitor, March 22, 2009. "Kings, emperors, generals, and presidents have all tinkered with the city. It's been walled, razed, and excavated. In the zeal of modernization that seized planners in the 1970s, its skyline was pierced by a single 59-story skyscraper and its boundaries fixed in concrete by an eight-lane beltway. Paris is once again on the drawing board. Commanded by President Nicolas Sarkozy to reimagine the capital as a 'world class city,' teams of internationally known architects have come up with 10 strategies for creating a metropolitan area known as Grand Paris -- it's the first major redesign since the Napoleonic era. Their ideas range from the prosaic to the fanciful. But they all say that Paris -- its public transit system saturated, its periphery spoiled by ugly housing projects, and its suburbs an undefined sprawl of disconnected towns -- does not work... The architectural teams, six of them French, were given the mission of envisioning the 'post-Kyoto' metropolis. They were left to define the boundaries of this newly conceived Grand Paris as they saw fit, but it was to incorporate the best of sustainable design techniques, energy efficient structures, and a mix of housing for both rich and poor."