A greener, calmer Arc de Triomphe could be en route.
Rendering courtesy PCA-Stream
A Green Transformation for the ‘World’s Most Beautiful Avenue’
By adding trees and taming traffic on the Champs Elysées, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo promises a car-free makeover for the French capital’s iconic boulevard.
This week, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo gave the green light to a dramatic makeover of the French capital’s most famous avenue, the Champs Elysées. Promising to turn the 1.4-mile (2.3 -kilometer) strip from the Place de La Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe into an “extraordinary garden,” the city’s $305 million plan, envisioned by architects PCA–Stream, will roughly halve the space allotted to cars, greatly increase the area’s tree cover and seek to encourage more small-scale shops along the avenue’s flanks.
The project, dubbed “Re-Enchanting the Champs Elysées” and due for completion by 2030, is arguably overdue. While the street still largely retains its international tag as the “world’s most beautiful avenue,” the Champs Elysées’ reputation among Parisians has been low for some time. Despite its grand buildings and dramatic vistas, the avenue has been widely criticized in France for being polluted, congested, pricey and — thanks to brand saturation and heavy tourism — even “ringarde,” a term probably best translated as “passé.”