The City of Paris, France: Jardins d’Éole

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Introduction

The city of Paris is famous for its obsession and its long tradition of designing its urban spaces, fact demonstrated from the large number of more than 450 designed public spaces (gardens, squares, parks, promenades etc.) included in its greater area. In the same time, many of the parisian gardens and parks seem to be heritage from its royal past or presents from previous presidents and mayors of the city and often tend to be ‘museumfied’.

An exceptional example between this plethora of designed urban spaces Paris has to offer is Jardins d’Éole. Designed in 2005 from Michel and Claire Corajoud and Georges Descombes as a “living space” or “space for life”, Jardins d’Éole distinguishes itself from the rest of the cases for several reasons; Firtsly, its location: Cour du Maroc (as the site’s name was before its redesign and rename to Jardins d’Éole), was a 4,2 hectars former rail yard stripe, placed near the center of the city between the 18th and the 19th arrondisement, in an interesting but complex urban area, between the built environment and the railway. The surrounding destrict is historically inhabited by a low-income, predominately immigrant, multicultural, underprivilleged and diverse community of users. The new park is a fruit of ten years of activism and environmental mobilization of its community ,represented by a neighborhood association, claiming the space as essential for the improvement of their everyday life conditions in the most dense area of Paris. Finally, the sucessful role of Jardins d’Éole as an inclusive urban space and interactive platform for its users, trying to reduce social and spatial inequalities make it an innovative examble of suastainable urban design.

History of the site...

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...he linearity of the site and introduces different recreational and interactive functions to its visitors combined with environmental issues. Entering from south east an open lawn meant for picnics and relaxing is located between a linear space of a swatch of gravel meant to be a wildflower garden and the large clay wallunder the viaduct. The clay wall is created by the artist Carmen Perrrin and

Works Cited

Newman, Andrew; Contested Ecologies: Environmental Activism and Urban Space in Immigrant Paris , published online, City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, 2011 p. 192–209

Malcolm, Woollen; Les Jardins d’Éole: extending the picturesque, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International

Quarterly, 33:4,2013, p. 290-304

Jole, Michel; The public of parks: in between observation and action, Urbani izziv, vol. 19, No. 2, Ljubljana, 2008

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