The Canal de l'Ourcq to Pantin

A bicycle ride along an old canal and into the future of Grand Paris.

A car-free promenade along the Canal de l’Ourcq in Pantin, northeast of Paris.

It's November now, deep into what feels like late fall, the ominous steely grey of winter already overhead too often, more wet days than dry ones.

This descent into the season of dead light (and, yes, onion soup and vin chaud and coziness all around) seems to be some long slide from a height of autumnal glory I didn't know we'd already reached a month or more ago. Summer in Paris, so crowded and humid, had given way seemingly overnight to an easier September of blue skies, crisp mornings, and warm afternoons. Glorious light spilled over from summer into the months of shortening days, and bright energy pervaded the city.

As I gaze out my window through barren trees toward the Sacré Coeur puncturing a grey and purple sky, I think back to one particularly free Saturday that was bathed in the warm golden glory that now feels so rare. Having finished my usual weekend chores that day, I craved an escape from the city's nonstop energy. The city's eastern canals are a haven of mellow outdoor pleasure, so I grabbed my bike and headed off in that direction.

Canal Saint-Martin is, after the Seine, the waterway most associated with Paris. It's ground zero for the relaxed, fun-seeking, forward-looking part of Paris's personality. I spend lots of time in restaurants, bars, and cafés in the canal zone, but have only rarely visited the waterway's northern extent.

So it was that on this summer Saturday, after descending from Montmartre and through the mayhem of market-day Boulevard de la Chapelle, that I swung left rather than right at the Place Stalingrad to set myself on a northwesterly course.

Canal at my left, trees overhead, people all about: this is Saturday at the city's best. I followed a paved two-way bike path along what here is called the Canal de l'Ourcq, so named for the riverbed on which it was built in 1825. Its original purpose was to bring drinking water to the city, but with the exception of some remaining (and dwindling) commercial activity, the canal system is now, largely, a pleasure course.

And a great pleasure it is. Cobbled streets and quays tightly hug the canals, glittering in the sun, as they pass through through the city's heart. Up here in the city's northwest, by contrast, the sky above the canal broadens and big trees and welcoming plazas outline the ensemble. The streets on either side receive little vehicle traffic, and so there's plenty of room for bicyclists, walkers, and wanderers to roam.

I continued northwest and passed a junction of waterways. Steer your boat left and you'll head through the Canal Saint-Denis, which winds its way eastward through the suburb of the same name before reaching great Seine. It's the third piece in Napoleon's 130-kilometer three-canal system that facilitated the industrial development of the Paris region until deindustrialization in the 1960s. Many remaining buildings and activities around the canals reflect this industrial rise and fall. Some industrial uses remain, and other spaces have been reimagined to suit today's urban economy and needs.

I followed the l'Ourcq to the right and entered the busy Parc de la Villette, 82 acres of glorious green, built in 1983 where the city's slaughterhouses once stood. I envy residents of the 19th arrondissement, whose local riches include not only this park and canal but also the spectacular Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (itself built on the site of the city's gallows!). Families, fitness fanatics, and explorers of the park's cultural attractions were out in numbers in Villette this sunny Saturday, and the atmosphere was relaxed and lively.

As the canal leaves the Parc de la Villette it passes beneath a roaring roadway viaduct. This is the Périphérique, a freeway encircling the twenty districts within Paris's formal city limits. If the city's development pattern follows the series of defensive walls erected over centuries of its history, the Périphérique is the last fortress standing. This eight-lane traffic-choked barrier walls off the gilded central city from its vibrant, diverse, and often disadvantaged suburbs.

The Périphérique does what freeways everywhere do best: spew noise and air pollution into surrounding neighborhoods, dump enormous volumes of traffic onto crowded city streets, and physically separate places that should be tightly knitted into a metropolitan whole. It is unpleasant, a scar, a hard border where there ought to be permeable urban mesh.

This is not to say that the Périphérique serves no purpose. The suburbs have long suffered from Paris-centric economic, transport, and governance frameworks that result in suburban disinvestment. For many outside the wall—about 11 million of the region's 13 million residents— driving is seen as the only practical choice.

That this represents a significant policy failure and an impediment to achieving the region's economic and environmental goals is well known. The French national government is responding with policy, economic development, and transport initiatives that would reinvest in greater Paris and integrate the city and suburbs into a more cohesive whole. Chief among these is Grand Paris Express, a project of new and extended métro rail lines that, if fully realized and paired with a proposed package of complementary land use reforms, would transform the transportation and economic landscape of the region. Several of these projects are (optimistically) timed to open for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Not to be outdone, the fearlessly progressive administration of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has floated its own proposals for the Périphérique, seizing the occasion of the 2024 games to implement a series of transit-only lanes on the ring road, to remove a lane of vehicle traffic altogether, to plant more air-cleaning vegetation along the highway, and other upgrades. In its final form, city hall envisions a freeway transformed into an urban boulevard and its major exits into public squares. This future could gloriously integrate city and suburb and redefine for future generations what "Paris" itself really is.

A vision for the Périphérique at Porte de Gentilly in 2030. It's compelling in comparison to today's traffic-choked freeway, but has too much automobile traffic, too few crossings, and is too wide; it falls short of the potential modeled gloriously by Paris's Haussmann-era boulevards. Image source: APUR

Hidalgo has been remarkably successful at transforming Paris's streets to better serve people biking, walking, and using transit in the face of harsh criticism. I hope she can replicate that success on the Périphérique, the true dismantling of which would represent an enormous victory for champions of human-scaled cities around the globe.

Proposal from the City of Paris for conversion of the Périphérique expressway to a landscaped boulevard. Image source: APUR

One place where the connection between city and suburb already does feel seamless is along the canal. As I reflected on the possibility of transportation and urban design to transform the region I realized I'd already left the city and entered Pantin.

I pass under the Pont de la Mairie. To my right are old mill buildings and warehouses transformed into restaurants, housing, and (more recently) corporate headquarters for firms like BNP Paribas, Hermès, and Chanel. This is the new Pantin, the outcome of a deliberate fifteen-year effort to attract middle-class workers and high-profile corporate investment to a suburb that languished, and where opportunities were scant, after deindustrialization.

The Pantin portion of the Canal de l’Ourcq is a much-needed gem of open space in a region starved for it. It's a model of post-industrial waterfront reuse, but raises critical questions about potential for cultural displacement in a redevelopment process where attraction of corporate capital is a central objective.

The effort appears to be paying off handsomely. The old warehouses gleam and the public enjoys beautifully landscaped plazas. Signals of creativity (and corporatized gentrification dressed up as creativity) abound here, with trendy restaurants, galleries, and boutiques blooming in creatively reconceived industrial spaces along and not far from the canal's edge.

On the other side of the Pont de la Mairie is the Mairie (city hall) itself and, beyond that, a large railyard. This is phase two of Pantin's transformation, with a hundred-acre mixed-use district set to rise here. This will be what European urban planners call an "eco-district," meaning it's a new neighborhood that combines housing, offices, shopping, and other daily needs, including transit and places to socialize, and is built with sustainability in mind.

That's a broad definition, but the plans for Pantin definitely fit the bill. With 1,400 housing units (a third of which will be designated for people with low and moderate incomes), over a million square feet of office space, shopping space, a school, and new parks and plazas, the district will be a new neighborhood as walkable and complete built as the very old ones surrounding it.

This is the same kind of development that has transformed similar post-industrial or underutilized parts of the Paris periphery, from Clichy-Batignolles in the west to Bercy in the east. Many of these have become hugely desirable places to live and work, especially where they offer fast access to the very heart of Paris.

This new district in Pantin will offer this, too. The question to me is whether it will also offer opportunities for housing, work, and well-being that continue to improve the lives of the less well-off. It's they who stuck around and built flourishing communities together in Pantin, and other poor towns in Seine-Saint-Denis, long before the glossy developments and corporate money started pouring in. It's a good thing that investment is leaping the Périphérique and destroying old notions of Paris's boundaries, but it's critical that those investments benefit the people who have long been here.

An upscale office and retail complex along a redesigned portion of the Canal de l’Ourcq in Pantin.