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City of Light forced to accept ugly truth

Paris’s city council has admitted that its new street furniture and other outdoor innovations have turned into eyesores, and has announced a ‘‘Manifesto for Beauty’’ to restore the French capital’s elegance.

Emmanuel Gregoire, deputy to the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, conceded that the council was responding to a two-year online campaign by critics using the hashtag #saccageParis (trashedParis), which has posted thousands of photographs of ugliness, including rough concrete benches, rotting flower boxes, overflowing rubbish bins, and vandalised traffic lights.

The council began removing the worst of the temporary fixtures, including plastic ‘‘mushroom seats’’, last year. It will revert when it can to the heavy wood and cast iron street furniture installed as part of the city’s revamp in the mid-19th century under Napoleon III, which came to symbolise Parisian elegance.

Newly planted trees will be fitted with ‘‘Davioud grilles’’, the circular plates around the trunk, rather than left open for local residents to plant flowers and shrubs. The ‘‘garden’’ scheme, introduced in 2015, has created some of the ugliest sights, with dead vegetation mixed with rubbish and dog poo.

Garish yellow markings and plastic bollards that mark temporary bicycle lanes opened after the first 2020 lockdown will also be replaced with fittings more in keeping with the city’s style. Unsightly concrete barriers and makeshift concrete benches in city squares will be removed.

Campaign groups gave a cautious welcome to the council’s break with what critics called its attempt to impose an unsuitable ‘‘Scandinavian’’ aesthetic on the City of Light. Opposition politicians on the council said Hidalgo seemed to have accepted that the effort to modernise the cityscape with inexpensive furniture had failed.

Maud Gatel, head of the centrist group on the council, said: ‘‘They want to protect the furniture of the Second Empire, but for the moment they are doing the exact opposite with their project for the Eiffel Tower.’’ Conservative district mayors and local residents are fighting the council’s scheme for turning the area around the famous tower into parkland.

World

en-nz

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuff.pressreader.com/article/282961043510410

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