Every day, as part of the municipal elections, Le Parisien scrutinizes a candidate’s declaration.
“Paris is denser than New Delhi and New York,” Cédric Villani said on Monday morning on France Info. The LREM deputy from Paris, a dissident candidate in the capital, was questioned about his transport and housing policy. “We are paying for the fact that Paris is so small,” he said, deeming it essential to work on these subjects with the neighboring municipalities and the Ile-de-France region.
Paris, an extremely dense city
According to the latest INSEE census, intramural Paris has 2,187,526 inhabitants. For an area of 105 km2, we reach a density of 20,754 inhabitants per km2. It is indeed much more than New York (7,101 inhabitants per km2) and New Delhi (5,855). Why such a distortion with the idea we have of it? Because New York is not limited to Manhattan and its tall towers, but also includes Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, with their habitat much more spread out. And because New Delhi is only a pocket of 249,000 inhabitants at the center of the immense Delhi conurbation which hosts 26.5 million inhabitants.
Paris, a very small capital
A few streets away, the French capital is contained within its ring road, a loop of only 35.04 km. In fact, with its 105 km2, the Parisian surface area is eight times smaller than that of Berlin, eleven times smaller than Rome and fifteen times smaller than that of London, to which it is nevertheless compared for the real estate inflation of the last decades. .
Paris, a compact city
If the size of the Parisian wall protects it from a phenomenon decried by some, urban sprawl, Paris is not an airy city. New York has towers and lower districts, Paris is more uniform. Only 1% of its 1.37 million dwellings are houses. Result: the buildings draw a homogeneous horizon line. This harmonious landscape appeals to tourists from all over the world as much as to Parisians, as evidenced by the latter’s epidermal opposition to the construction of towers.
It was Henri IV who had the first town planning regulations promulgated in Paris in 1607. It will be regularly amended in order to protect the city from fires – 80% of central London was devastated in 1666 -, but will also determine the height of the buildings.
Paris, a city that has always been very inhabited
The considerable development of the 18th and 19th centuries was accompanied by a significant rural exodus to Paris. It was in the 1840s that the Parisian population exceeded the million mark. In 1860, Thiers had the walls of the farmers general destroyed, an enclosure 24 km in circumference which established a fiscal border between the city and its surroundings. By absorbing its suburbs, where any new construction was however prohibited, the Parisian population swelled suddenly by half a million inhabitants. The route of Paris will therefore vary little, including only “the zone”, a strip of 250 m wide all around the capital, which should allow it to be better defended. This naked lace – even the trees are razed there – will quickly become a huge slum. It is this perimeter that will give rise to the popular expression “it is the zone” to speak of a lost and / or disturbing place.
The Parisian population reached its peak (2.9 million) in 1921 and since then has steadily declined.
Paris, a less green city
No offense to the mayors who have succeeded at its head, Paris is not a city to enjoy bare spaces. There are few large parks in the heart of the city, apart from the Tuileries Gardens and Luxembourg. The first intramural green space may well concentrate more than 4,000 trees, the Père-Lachaise cemetery is not an enclosure where one can run or play, nor are the magnificent lawns of the Jardin des Plantes… While West London, Manhattan and Berlin have huge green pockets in the heart of the city that are widely accessible.
In summary
Cédric Villani is right to say that Paris is a very dense city. This population load per km2 is explained by its contained geography, its waves of urbanization and its way of conceiving the habitat.
–
