Paris, Swimming in the Seine, and a Bid to Be the World’s Greenest City
The greening of Paris builds on the city’s history leading revolutionary change.
Picture this — a world-class athlete rises out of the Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower, their toned body glistening in the sun. It is an image of youth and vitality set against the iconic symbol of a triumphant past age. Municipal leaders of Paris have been working hard so that the 2024 Olympics will present exactly this image to the world. It is an image that evokes both past glories and future promise. Specifically, it is an image that promises a better future for Paris, and for the world.
If all goes to plan, swimmers will compete in the Seine during this year’s Olympic games. This will be the latest milestone achieved by an intensive effort to make Paris a greener, more sustainable city. Olympic swimmers competed in the Seine during the games in 1900, but when the Olympics returned to Paris in 1924 swimming in the river had been outlawed. Growth and development degraded water quality in the river throughout the 20th century. By the 1990s, the Seine was one of the most highly polluted rivers in the world.
Paris is now in the midst of a green revolution. This is part of a larger plan for a broad-based ecological and social transition by the city. An ambitious program to plant trees and nurture gardens on vacant plots has made the city’s streets greener. There are more bicycles, fewer cars, and an expanded Metro system. A walking path, parks, and cafes line the Right Bank of the Seine where there was once an expressway. Paris aims to be, not just a greener city, but the world’s preeminent sustainable city — the model for other cities to follow.
Paris has done this before. In 1900, Paris declared itself to be the “Capital of the Civilized World” at the opening of the International Exposition Universelle. It was the height of the industrial revolution, the Age of Progress, a time of unbridled optimism, and Paris embodied the hope and promise of the new century.
Revolutionary change, experimentation, and innovation are ingrained in the city’s DNA. Paris — Capital of the Civilized World — was the product of a century of profound political, economic, and social upheaval, the 19th century. That century began, appropriately enough, with the French Revolution of 1789.
Paris has long held the ambition to be the preeminent city of the world, comparable to the fabled cities of Athens and Rome during ancient times. Wary of the city’s ambition and its growing power in the 17th century, King Louis XIV moved his royal court out of Paris to the village of Versailles. Leaders of the French Revolution returned the seat of government to Paris in 1789. Then, as the aristocracy of Europe and England looked on in horror, they brought the French monarchy to an end with a swift slice from the guillotine.
During the following century, Paris grew from a population of 550,000 in 1800 to 2.7 million in 1900. At the same time, the continuing impact of the French Revolution and the industrial revolution upended the social order in France. The French monarchy was removed, restored, then finally brought to a permanent end. The aristocracy and clergy lost their privileged positions. The feudal economy, based on hereditary control of rural estates worked by peasant farmers, gave way to an increasingly urbanized economic system based on industry and commerce.
The turbulent 19th century raised the social classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class to prominence. Members of the Bourgeoisie class, particularly industrialists and financiers, exploited the opportunities brought by industrialization to amass personal fortunes that rivaled the wealth of the established aristocratic families. The working class in Paris grew as rural peasants were thrown into the city by desperate circumstances. Paris became an arena where these two classes struggled for survival and control over their fates, sparking revolutions in 1830, and 1848, and the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1870.
At the hands of Emperors Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Louis Napoleon, Paris was transformed from a medieval city into a modern metropolis, and it acquired the trappings of monumental architecture appropriate to its ambition. During the First French Empire (1804 to 1814), Napoleon Bonaparte made Paris the seat of a European empire of conquest. During the Second French Empire (1852 to 1870), Louis-Napoleon launched the decades-long urban renewal project that gave the streets of Paris the distinctive character they retain today.
The vast social experiment of 19th century France also produced a distinctive third new class of individuals, far less numerous than either the Bourgeoisie or the working class but more influential in their own way — the professional engineer. Highly educated in math and science, French engineers worked in government and industry as technocrats and entrepreneurs. At the end of the 19th century engineers in France held positions of influence and power. By their training engineers were imbued with a shared purpose to serve the common good through public works.
At the hands of the engineers, the Industrial Revolution made Paris a center of industry and finance and a showcase of modern technology. Known as the City of Light, Paris was among the first cities to be illuminated by gaslights, early in the century, and electricity at the century’s end. Paris became the center of a global network for communication and transportation made possible with the invention of the railroad, steamships, the telegraph, and the telephone.
The construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 proclaimed the technological and industrial prowess of Paris and France. The tower served as the centerpiece for the Expositions Universelle in 1889, 1900 and 1937. The Eiffel Tower was, by far, the tallest structure ever built, a title it held for 40 years. It was a spear thrust triumphantly into the sky by French engineers.
The greening of Paris began in earnest with 2015, the year in which Paris hosted the COP21 negotiations that produced the first international agreement to combat climate change. At the beginning of the 21st century, over half of all people live in cities. Therefore, cities will play a central role in efforts to combat climate change and preserve the environment. And, Paris intends to lead
The goals for greening Paris address climate change and its impacts, environmental quality, biodiversity, energy, urban agriculture, reducing waste, and building a circular economy. Municipal leaders want to make Paris 100 percent cyclable by 2026 and eliminate diesel- and gasoline-powered cars entirely by 2030. Twenty percent of buildings will have green roofs by 2030. New parks are being created and trees are being planted everywhere.
The infrastructure of the city, its roads, canals, rail lines, parks, buildings, and subterranean spaces, is the foundation on which municipal leaders intend to build a sustainable city. The Eiffel Tower, built to celebrate the achievements of a past age, is being repurposed as the flagship for the greening of Paris. The tower sits at the center of the area between the Place de Trocadero and the Ecole Militaire, a swath 1.6 kilometers long, that is being transformed into a new “green lung” for Paris.
Making the Seine swimmable again will be an engineering triumph. In 2020 engineers launched a crash program to connect more homes to sewer networks, upgrade sewage treatment upstream of Paris, and carve a vast subterranean cavern in the southeastern corner of the city. The Austerlitz storage basin, buried below the Square Marie-Curie, is 50 meters in diameter and 30 meters deep. During heavy rains it can capture a volume of water equivalent to twenty Olympic swimming pools to prevent sewers from overflowing and polluting the Seine.
The return of swimming to the Seine after 100 years is a dream that appeals even to skeptics of the city’s greening efforts. Some older residents grumble that removing cars from some streets has made it nearly impossible to drive anywhere in the city. However, many others embrace the fact that it is now easier to get around by bicycle. Life in Paris has improved in many other respects. The image of Olympic swimmers competing in the Seine bolsters Paris’ claim to the greenest city title, and it will demonstrate to the world what is possible for cities to accomplish.
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More by this author: Read about the 19th century roots of the engineering profession and the 72 engineers and scientists named on the Eiffel Tower.
