Postcard from Paris, France: Linear parks rejuvenate neighborhoods

Above: Adjudicating outcome of an afternoon boules game along the Ourcq Canal.

Paris had to be more than a manicured museum preserved for the affluent beneath the Eiffel Tower and the Pantheon’s dome.”

“A City Reinvented: Paris Is Now Greater Paris,” Roger Cohen, New York Times, August 31, 2025

When we returned this past spring, our prior trip to Paris had been forty years earlier. Obviously, things have changed. We found ourselves afoot exploring areas of the city regarded as neither appealing nor safe for boulevardiers back then, areas such as an abandoned railroad line that runs across the 12th Arrondissement from the Bastille to the Bois de Boulogne.

I had believed New York’s High Line was the first urban project to transform an elevated rail line from a blight to a tool sparking urban revitalization. But I now realized that the acorn for that idea germinated from Paris’ Promenade Plantee, or Coulee Verte Rene-Durmont, inaugurated in 1993. Sixty arches supporting the three-mile elevated promenade were transformed into commercial spaces for cafes and creative arts.

Exploring along our stroll, we found a funky neighborhood restaurant, L’Alchimiste (click on earlier food post).

Above: Scenes along Promenade Plantee

Tourists troop to the Louvre, but the action is no longer on the Seine River — it is on a 200-year-old canal, the Ourcq.”

“A City Reinvented: Paris Is Now Greater Paris,” Roger Cohen, New York Times, August 31, 2025

Roger Cohen’s dissing of the Seine scene might be a tad exaggerated, but the public pathways along the Ourq do seem to belong to Parisians themselves, young and old. The Ourcq itself is a small river that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) tapped into to supply Paris with a new route for the transportation of goods and for drinking water via a system of canals.

The recent Olympics stimulated economic growth along the Ourcq in the Saint Denis District of Paris, increasing amenities and opportunities for housing. We found the pathways along Canal Saint Martin from Bastille to the Bassin de la Villette and the Ourcq Canal a relaxing route to explore areas we’d never accessed on earlier visits. A Master Plan adopted this year will continue to enhance landscaping, recreational usage and linkages along the Ourcq and Saint Denis Canal.

Above: Scenes along the Ourcq Canal

Both walks are recommended for stretching your legs a bit and uncovering parts of Paris that seem hidden from most visitors. The city offers so much more than its top ten attractions.

The renovation and revamping of unused parking lots, defunct railway lines, shuttered industrial areas or vacant land into linear parks connects neighbourhoods and offers space to interact and spend time cycling, walking and loitering…. The green zones also turn into a city’s lungs — a reprieve in the concrete maze of urbanization.”  

“Linear parks: Adding value to urban landscape,” Question of Cities, April 19, 2024