ReGreeneration is a Horizon Europe-awarded project working across nine cities to advance urban regeneration through nature-based solutions, participatory governance, and integrated approaches to climate resilience and social equity. The nine cities in the project portfolio span a range of urban typologies, scales, and planning traditions, forming a living laboratory for rethinking sustainable urban transformation in practice. Each city brings distinct challenges and ambitions to the collaboration, and this series of articles explores what each city is doing and what the broader design community can learn from it.
Paris, the first city of this series, is one of the densest and most walkable cities in Europe, served by an expansive, effective metro system. Yet it has spent decades organized largely around private vehicles, with consequences including chronic air pollution, streets inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists, and a public realm that prioritizes vehicle movement over residents' quality of life. It is a city of renowned architectural heritage and public spaces in its historic core, and simultaneously one where green space allocation falls well below European goals, where the urban heat island effect intensifies with each passing summer, and where the gap between the inner arrondissements and peripheral banlieues defines metropolitan inequality.
