The avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris is being radically rebuilt. The left city government and local luxury companies want to slow down the traffic on the boulevard together.
The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been pursuing a primary goal since her election in 2014: She wants to ban car traffic from the French capital as much as possible. The expressways along the Seine have already been closed, now the historic city center around the Louvre is becoming a pedestrian zone, and Tempo 30 is to apply in the rest of the city from the end of August. Thousands of parking spaces are being canceled, and entire boulevards are being traffic-calmed.
But the most visible sign that Paris is literally “green” will be the Champs-Elysées: Hidalgo wants to transform it into an “extraordinary garden” within three years. The 62-year-old socialist made an initial announcement in this direction in February 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic.
The metamorphosis of the Champs-Elysées should be completed by the start of the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024. However, this schedule cannot be adhered to. As the spokeswoman for the lead architecture firm PCA-Stream, Pauline Rieuf, told this newspaper, the lower part of the avenue around the Place de la Concorde should only be completed by 2024.
On this largest square in the French capital, where kings and aristocrats were guillotined during the revolution, there is a hurry: urban Olympic disciplines such as skateboarding, BMX and three-way basketball are held there. And some of these systems should still be in place after the games.
The section of the Champs-Elysées between Concorde and Franklin D. Roosevelt-Platz is being transformed into a park with 360 additional trees and 24 hectares of green space – plus playgrounds and sports facilities. The Concorde, where cars still rush past in all directions without respecting zebra crossings, will become an “island of peace”, as “Le Parisien” presumes only slightly exaggerated. In general, the local paper rejoices with a good pinch of chauvinism: “The most beautiful avenue in the world will now also be the greenest.”
Even today, says the leading architect and urbanist Philippe Chiambaretta, the dead straight Champs-Elysées are a real “motorway” for 72,000 vehicles a day. By 2024, the avenue’s eight lanes will shrink by half. For this purpose, not only wider sidewalks – sidewalks – should be created on both sides of the road, but “real terraces”, as the architect from southern France calls them.
A promenade is also to be created in the middle of the 70-meter-wide avenue. And Hidalgo wants to ensure that it is sufficiently wide and protected so that strollers do not feel squeezed between the car lanes. Today the dead straight Champs-Elysées are a busy east-west axis of Paris; On Saturday evenings, suburban youths run and demonstrate their racing cars there. In the future, Tempo 30, perhaps even Tempo 20, should apply there, as in pedestrian zones. The leisurely movement should be the trump card.
This also applies to the round square of the triumphal arch at the top of the two-kilometer-long avenue. Gone are the chronic chaos scenes known from films with honking cars wedged into one another: the roundabout around Napoleon’s prestigious monument is to be narrowed to a maximum of two lanes. As in a pedestrian zone, the asphalt is replaced by brightly patterned stone blocks. In summer the round course is to serve as a sandy beach and in winter as an ice rink.
Even in Paris, little is known that the idea for this profound renovation of the Champs-Elysées in 2018 did not come from the red-green city government, but from the “Comité des Champs-Elysées”, the association of shop owners and tenants . They know that the countless postcard motifs are deceptive to the “most beautiful avenue”: Today Parisians hardly ever go for a walk or go shopping on the “Champs” – as they call them. According to a market study, they only make up four percent of the 100,000 daily visitors to the avenue. Many are bothered by the traffic noise, the high prices and the crowd on the sidewalks as well as the pickpockets.
During the day, wealthy Asian or Anglo-Saxon tourists dominate the action on the Champs-Elysées and in the evening or on weekends, the penniless young people meet there in front of the shop windows with the unreachably expensive luxury goods.
The lack of local customers is a cause for concern for all the luxury brands that pay horrific rent rates of around 1500 euros a month – per square meter, mind you, especially on the sunny side of the avenue. They saved themselves quite well over the time of the crisis of the pandemic. According to a study by the “Mytraffic” office, the Champs-Elysées and Kurfürstendamm in Berlin lost “only” 40 percent of customers in 2020, while Via del Corso in Rome, Oxford Street in London and Gran Vía in Madrid recorded more catastrophic slumps. Huge construction work is currently underway on the Paris luxury mile for the arrival of new brands such as Dior, Lacoste and Yves Saint-Laurent; Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the five-star Sofitel are renovating their buildings.
These high investments want to be recovered. The “Comité des Champs-Elysées” therefore also targets the wealthy Parisian middle class and the wealthy bourgeois bohemians (“Bobos”). This requires a new decor that is greener in every respect. With their initiative, the shopkeepers quickly received the support of the red-green city government, which contributed at least 200 million euros in construction costs. Visitors to the Paris Olympics can then see for themselves how much luxury business and eco-thinking can go hand in hand.
