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The Parisian urban planning workshop on the scale of Paris and Greater Paris documents, deciphers, supports, illuminates, projects, explores and shares diversity.

Towards a residential park in Greater Paris - Grand Paris -

How to enhance a mosaic of individual gardens

With its 416,500 detached houses, accommodating 1.16 million inhabitants, Grand Paris Metropolis is the city with the greatest number of individual houses in France. Their gardens form a veritable green belt and a formidable ecological reservoir on a metropolitan scale, which if developed could be a valuable resource for confronting climate change. This study conducted by the landscape architect agency Michel Desvigne and Urban-Eco explores the potential of transforming a mosaic of gardens into a Grand Paris residential park.

Icône de la catégorie Towards a residential park in Greater Paris - Grand Paris - How to enhance a mosaic of individual gardens
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View of the suburban fabric towards Boulevard de l'Europe, Montfermeil (93) © Apur - David Boureau

The gardens in these residential areas cover a total of 10,700 hectares, which is equivalent to five times the size of Bois de Vincennes, and have a great geographic and contextual diversity: geological, ground surfaces, topography, pre-existing forested land etc. They are also characterised by the shape and size of land plots, their relationship to houses, the amount of vegetation and the vision and use of inhabitants.

To move towards the graphic concept of an expansive residential park, it seems important to maintain the individual qualities of each garden. At the same time it would be essential to invent ways of connecting gardens and weaving an ecological and landscape continuity that integrates these key spaces into the green and blue network of Grand Paris. This being complementary to the creation of public green spaces (urban parks, gardens, squares, promenades).

The principal idea is to develop ways of planting and organising gardens, based on their capacity to provide the qualities of coolness, shade, biodiversity and conducive conditions for the presence of small urban wildlife. This would also mean protecting and extending permeable surfaces, increasing tree covered areas, reinforcing biodiversity, favouring porous land plot boundaries and facilitating rainwater infiltration.  

This valorisation of the ecological and climatic qualities of gardens in areas of detached housing, involves raising the general awareness of residents and convincing them to instigate or increase, sometimes already existing practices. In particular, this means encouraging residents to plant more trees in their gardens, including near the edges of their plots "right up to the boundaries of neighbouring properties", and exploiting this specific aspect of Grand Paris, of which we are reminded in the Cheuvreux Study. Variations of this approach could also find their way into the local urban planning schemes drawn up and be given a regulatory dimension in order to amplify their impact on moving towards the great residential park of Grand Paris Metropolis.

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