Porte de Clignancourt is one of the twenty-four junctions that connect the twenty arrondissements into which Paris is divided with the Péripherique, the ring road that surrounds the French capital and geographically separates it from its suburbs. Until about ten years ago, it was a place that tourists only visited for the historic and chaotic Saint-Ouen flea market. However, since 2014, it has been included in the travel plans of many people, both tourists and locals, thanks to the opening of a multifunctional space where you can have brunch or get your bike repaired, attend conferences or study for a few hours. It’s called La Recyclerie, it has a very recognizable green and yellow and slightly crooked sign, and while some love it, others consider it a very clear symbol of the gentrification that is taking place in a historic working-class area of the city.
La Recyclerie opened in an old, disused train station. From the large windows you can still see the tracks surrounded by weeds and bushes, which are open to the public when the weather is nice. This is the Petite Ceinture, the old railway line that, before the inauguration of the subway, carried passengers from part of the city, covering 32 kilometers in about an hour and a half. Closed to passenger traffic since 1934 and to freight traffic in 1993, the Petite Ceinture was abandoned until about fifteen years ago, when various associations began to open to the public some sections of the old railway line, now covered with vegetation and turning them into small public parks.
Today, about half of the route is open to the public, but the SNCF – the main French public rail transport company, of which the Petite Ceinture is a part – considers it merely an “unused line” and has intervened that could lead to compromises. always prohibited the hypothetical reuse for the passage of trains.
So the Petite Ceinture is at the center of a debate between those who would like to transform it into Paris’s largest park – trusting that it will provide citizens with refreshment on the hottest days – and those who are pushing for it to be reopened used the existing route to pass through a new, state-of-the-art public transport system in a city that continues to attract large numbers of people.
La Recyclerie, in the distance (il Post)
The Petite Ceinture was developed between 1852 and 1869. It was a period of heavy industrialization, the city began to incorporate neighboring villages, and the local administration faced two major logistical problems. Until then, the construction of railway lines in France had been entrusted to various private companies, and each of them had built its own station in the center of Paris. In the end there were ten different railway lines that ran radially to the city and terminated in as many terminals: this is why there are still so many major train stations in the city today, including Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est and Gare de Lyon , Gare Montparnasse and Gare Saint-Lazare.
However, these stations were not connected in any way: when goods had to be transported from one French city to another via Paris, it often happened that they had to be taken off the first train and transported by cart from another part of the city and then transferred to another train, wasting a lot of time and money.
Second, there was no quick way to transport troops and weapons along the Walls of Thiers, the fortifications around the city that King Louis Philip built in the hope of making the city impregnable in the event of an attack by foreign powers. Faced with these problems, in 1951 the government made the construction of a railway line between the various Paris terminals a priority, which was built in various phases throughout the rest of the century and extended a final time in preparation for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.
The Petite Ceinture was rarely used for military purposes – except in the Franco-Prussian War between 1870 and 1871 and then by the Nazis during the Occupation of Paris in World War II – but enjoyed enormous commercial success for several decades. During the week it was used to transport the workers who lived in the villages around Paris to the large factories built on the outskirts of the city; On weekends it was used by a more middle-class crowd interested in visiting the large forest on the outskirts of the city, the Bois de Vincennes, which still exists today. In 1900, the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris and the construction of the Eiffel Tower, it carried 39 million passengers: an enormous number, especially for the historical period. A year later the first subway line was opened.
“In 1870, the Petite Ceinture was truly the greatest example of modernism. But it suffered greatly from competition with the subway, which was cheaper, electric and considered much more modern: trains went out of fashion from one moment to the next,” explains Antoine Sander, president of the Association des Promeneurs de la Petite Ceinture organizes walks along the original route of the railway line and is pushing for most of the route to be open to the public. The group of railway companies that founded it failed to reach an agreement with those responsible for the city’s transport system on the integration of the two systems, and so the Petite Ceinture stopped carrying passengers in 1934.
The transport of goods continued for another sixty years until, in 1993, the de-industrialization of the city center made the presence of a connecting line between the former factories less necessary. “At that point, the Petite Ceinture became kind of a wasteland,” says Sander. “There was a moment when the possibility of allowing trams to pass through was discussed very seriously and concretely, but for political reasons it was finally decided to allow them to pass along the Boulevard des Maréchaux.” And the old railway remained there, increasingly covered with spontaneous vegetation , inhabited by homeless people and only visited by those who wanted to explore the city or use it to get to the catacombs.
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Today, the Petite Ceinture is a jumble of different things: some sections have been secured, tidied up, and outfitted with benches and tables so everyone can walk, run, or picnic; others are completely inaccessible and quite dangerous to reach; Still others can be reached from one of the various train stations, which, like the Recyclerie, have been converted into clubs and cultural spaces and can accommodate movie nights or concerts, as well as plenty of deckchairs on summer days.
Most of the homeless people living there have moved elsewhere. Only a section of a few kilometers in the east of the city was completely shut down for the construction of a motorway, otherwise the tracks still run uninterrupted, albeit somewhat dilapidated, around the city.
A section of the Petite Ceinture completely closed to the public and covered in vegetation (the post)
After the suspension of train services, the first section was opened to the public in 1998 thanks to the efforts of a group of citizens living on a street in the 18th arrondissement (in the north-central part of the city). I’m tired of seeing that Tracks are covered with garbage or used as places for drug trafficking and prostitution. However, most opened thanks to a flow of investment between 2016 and 2017, then between 2019 and 2020 and again in 2022. Forecasts suggest that by 2026 it will be possible to ride 15 kilometers along the Petite Rails Ceinture, even if this will always be separate sections.
The route in its entirety is also considered a “biodiversity protected area” because after the closure, many animal species, including those threatened with extinction, quickly settled there and took advantage of the unmanaged vegetation: foxes, martens, wall lizards, porcupines and the largest colony of Pipistrelle bats in continental Europe. Not only were trees planted in the 19th century to stabilize the ground around the railway line, but also cherry and plum trees that grew from stones thrown by train passengers, as well as laurel trees and other native plants that grew from private gardens have spread near the railway line or were sometimes secretly planted by the railway employees themselves.
Some environmental groups fear that increasing human activity on the tracks is damaging biodiversity and, in particular, driving away the animals that live there. However, much of the public debate on this matter – at the moment mainly from the various associations dedicated to the petite ceinture and some local politicians – focuses on what the petite ceinture will become in the future in the context of a densely populated and densely populated area could concrete city that has already reached temperatures well above historical averages in recent summers, and it is investing heavily in sustainability.
Although there are several well-known parks, from the Jardins des Luxembourg overlooking the French Senate to the Parc des Tuileries in front of the Louvre Museum, Paris is a city with fewer trees than other European capitals and suffers greatly from being an “island”. “Thermal effect,” resulting in a warmer microclimate in urban areas compared to surrounding suburban and rural areas.
The city center is generally two to three degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs, and the temperature difference can be up to 10 degrees during heat waves due to the many dark surfaces that absorb much more solar radiation than the ground and trees heat up more. The low presence of non-asphalted soil and trees in the city also results in lower evapotranspiration, i.e. the moist part of the soil. This process allows heat to be absorbed from the environment and thus contributes to temperature fluctuations.
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There are some forests nearby – for example the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne – but they are still far from the center and it takes a little time to get there: for this reason too you can have a refreshment on hot days find complex. However, it is significantly cooler on the old tracks of the Petite Ceinture, especially near the tunnel entrances and in the sections built several meters below street level: according to an analysis by the Paris City Planning Office, it is there in some places in summer. The difference between the main street and the tracks near the tunnels is up to fifteen degrees.
A part of the Petite Ceinture (il Post) open to the public and equipped with benches
Precisely to create a fresh space in the center of the city, a group of activists wants the Petite Ceinture to become “the largest park in the capital and the longest urban promenade in the world,” with a total area of more than 60 hectares of greenery. In addition to opening and securing all outdoor areas still closed to the public, the Association des promeneurs de la petite ceinture wants the City of Paris to build planted paths along the inaccessible rail sections, such as tunnels, etc. Old bridges that are now very expensive to restore .
The idea would be to explore the city on foot or by bike on a long, uninterrupted route of about thirty kilometers. The association’s slogan is: “The largest park in Paris is hidden from your eyes.” Something similar to the city of New York with the Highline, the elevated train route that was transformed in 2009 into a popular pedestrian route with lots of greenery, even if in the sense of the Paris associations should be less demanding and more “popular”. in appearance.
“The main problem is not technical, but simply economic,” explains Sander. “Nothing is impossible at a technical level, but it is a project that would actually cost around 60 million euros and the cost-benefit ratio is not always in our favor.” Aware that they need much more public support In order to convince local politicians of the importance of the project, the Promeneurs focus primarily on awareness-raising events, organizing picnics and long group walks along the Petite Ceinture in order to raise awareness of the existence of these spaces and their history to as many people as possible make available.
In fact, according to the activist, many Parisians still don’t really know what those disused rails are that they see from time to time when walking around the city, although the municipality has put up information boards to tell the story Petite Ceinture in different corners the capital. “For example, when I went to the recycling store for the first time a few years ago, I was wondering what those rails were, but it took me a while to discover the story behind them,” he says.
A walk organized by the Promeneurs de la petite ceinture (the Post Office).
However, the Promeneurs, which took the form of a formal association in 2020, are not the main group committed to the transformation of the Petite Ceinture: the more historical group, in existence since 1992 and over time having relationships with both the SNCF and the local Community and the national government is the Association pour la sauvegarde de la petite ceinture. The journalist Jean-Nicolas Lehec is there: he explains that they want to preserve the Petite Ceinture as a cultural and architectural heritage, but their main goal is undoubtedly to fight for trains to run again on the old railway line.
“We believe that it would be a very special opportunity to get Parisians excited about Paris again, but above all that it could play a leading role in the capital’s energy transition project,” says Lehec. Already, some lines of the Paris public transport system attract too many passengers compared to those for which they are designed, and it will be necessary to further expand the system to discourage the use of cars (one of the capital’s great goals ). has become established in recent years) and is intended to serve some new districts that are under construction.
Lehec claims that it would be fairly easy to renew existing infrastructure to run light trains that are quieter than before and potentially run on hydrogen, both for passenger transport and to make urban logistics more sustainable, as trucks instead cause a lot of pollution. The fact that the line is already in the middle of the Ile de France – the region in which Paris is located and the most densely populated in the country – and therefore close to places where millions of people live or work Having an opinion on this would make it even more strategic.
“The new BNP headquarters will soon open in the north, on the border with Aubervilliers: more vehicles will be needed to transport the thousands of people who will work there.” There is the new Bercy-Charenton district, which will soon be completed . And there are still entire districts in the center that are very poorly connected to the metro, such as the Buttes-Chaumont or the Père Lachaise cemetery area: the Petite Ceinture already runs through all of these areas.”
“If we really want to talk about ecology, we cannot avoid discussing transport, and trains are undoubtedly one of the least polluting means of transport there is.” “We can’t just talk about bikes and walks, even if we “We could imagine a hybrid use by using part of the area as small parks,” says Lehec. In addition, the Petite Ceinture, which has already been built, does not require any expropriation of land to be expanded, even if millions of dollars in investments would still be necessary to renovate the tracks, build new stations and adapt the system to modern means.
A section of the Petite Ceinture that can be viewed from the Hasard Ludique and in the distance a closed tunnel (il Post).
According to the association’s calculations, it would take about five years to transform the Petite Ceinture into a modern and functional line: this requires first a coordination of the will of the national government, the metropolitan government and those of the various arrondissements, as well as the SNCF to make this possible . “There are many conflicting interests,” explains Lehec. “To name just one: some people have bought houses on the Petite Ceinture also because of the view of the vegetation, but they would not appreciate it at all if they suddenly had a house on a railway line, even if it was very bright and bright not very loud.”
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