Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
This week, Globizen announced a new journal series called Global City Builders. The idea is pretty simple. It's about having conversations with city builders from around the world who are working to create better places. This obviously includes people like architects and developers, but it might also include artists, local entrepreneurs, activists, and countless other change agents. The format is a simple Q&A and for this first one we spoke with Paris-based Avenier Cornejo architectes and its two founders: Christelle Avenier and Miguel Cornejo. Here's the link. I hope you enjoy it.
If you or someone you know would like to connect with us about future editions of Global City Builders, feel free to reach out to hello@globizen.com.
Cover photo by Charly Broyez via Avenier Cornejo
Some of you might remember that I grew up going to a French school here in Toronto. My mom had rightly decided that I should be able to speak both of Canada's official languages. But truthfully, I never really loved it as a kid. I started midway through elementary school and so I always felt a little insecure about my French abilities. Which is partially why in the fall of 2023, I decided to enroll in night classes at Alliance Française. I've been doing it ever since and I can feel my French getting markedly better. There's also something deeply nostalgic about being in a French class.
Generally speaking, the classes are pretty relaxed (sometimes we learn grammar and sometimes we just talk about delicious cheeses), but at the end of last year I decided to register for the DELF exam. DELF stands for Diplôme d'études en langue française and it's a diploma for non-native speakers of French offered by France's Ministry of Education. It's offered at various proficiency levels and I registered for level B2, which France describes in the following way:
One of the reasons why I registered for this particular level is that it will soon become the minimum level of language proficiency required to become a French citizen. Currently you need the equivalent of B1, but starting January 1, 2026, I understand it will jump up to B2. I, of course, don't know if I will ever need this, move to France, and/or seek to become a citizen, but it became a goal. I told myself that I wanted the diploma that proves one's French is good enough to be an actual citizen. I guess it was a way to conquer my childhood insecurities.
So I'm happy to report that I ended up taking the exam in early March and that last week I received my passing grade. I scored just under 90%. (My weakest section was the handwritten essay.) After I got the news, I came home to the below book sitting on the kitchen counter with a bow and thoughtful handwritten note from Bianca — in French I would add — congratulating me on achieving this goal. One of the first things I said was, "wait, when did you buy this? How did you get it so quickly?" And she responded with, "I ordered it a long time ago, because I knew you'd pass."
The book is called Paris Haussmann and it's a comprehensive look at Haussmann's 19th century plans for the city. It covers every scale, from the city's boulevards (morphological scale) down to individual floor plans for each building type (typological scale). It's a truly extraordinary book and it's also highly relevant to one of the things that Globizen is focused on right now, which is the building of infill housing on Toronto's major streets. The urban context isn't exactly the same, of course, but there's a lot to be learned from this human-scaled building type. So even if you aren't trying to overcome some childhood insecurity related to the French, I highly recommend you check out this book.
Cover photo via Pavillon de l'arsenal
Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
This week, Globizen announced a new journal series called Global City Builders. The idea is pretty simple. It's about having conversations with city builders from around the world who are working to create better places. This obviously includes people like architects and developers, but it might also include artists, local entrepreneurs, activists, and countless other change agents. The format is a simple Q&A and for this first one we spoke with Paris-based Avenier Cornejo architectes and its two founders: Christelle Avenier and Miguel Cornejo. Here's the link. I hope you enjoy it.
If you or someone you know would like to connect with us about future editions of Global City Builders, feel free to reach out to hello@globizen.com.
Cover photo by Charly Broyez via Avenier Cornejo
Some of you might remember that I grew up going to a French school here in Toronto. My mom had rightly decided that I should be able to speak both of Canada's official languages. But truthfully, I never really loved it as a kid. I started midway through elementary school and so I always felt a little insecure about my French abilities. Which is partially why in the fall of 2023, I decided to enroll in night classes at Alliance Française. I've been doing it ever since and I can feel my French getting markedly better. There's also something deeply nostalgic about being in a French class.
Generally speaking, the classes are pretty relaxed (sometimes we learn grammar and sometimes we just talk about delicious cheeses), but at the end of last year I decided to register for the DELF exam. DELF stands for Diplôme d'études en langue française and it's a diploma for non-native speakers of French offered by France's Ministry of Education. It's offered at various proficiency levels and I registered for level B2, which France describes in the following way:
One of the reasons why I registered for this particular level is that it will soon become the minimum level of language proficiency required to become a French citizen. Currently you need the equivalent of B1, but starting January 1, 2026, I understand it will jump up to B2. I, of course, don't know if I will ever need this, move to France, and/or seek to become a citizen, but it became a goal. I told myself that I wanted the diploma that proves one's French is good enough to be an actual citizen. I guess it was a way to conquer my childhood insecurities.
So I'm happy to report that I ended up taking the exam in early March and that last week I received my passing grade. I scored just under 90%. (My weakest section was the handwritten essay.) After I got the news, I came home to the below book sitting on the kitchen counter with a bow and thoughtful handwritten note from Bianca — in French I would add — congratulating me on achieving this goal. One of the first things I said was, "wait, when did you buy this? How did you get it so quickly?" And she responded with, "I ordered it a long time ago, because I knew you'd pass."
The book is called Paris Haussmann and it's a comprehensive look at Haussmann's 19th century plans for the city. It covers every scale, from the city's boulevards (morphological scale) down to individual floor plans for each building type (typological scale). It's a truly extraordinary book and it's also highly relevant to one of the things that Globizen is focused on right now, which is the building of infill housing on Toronto's major streets. The urban context isn't exactly the same, of course, but there's a lot to be learned from this human-scaled building type. So even if you aren't trying to overcome some childhood insecurity related to the French, I highly recommend you check out this book.
Cover photo via Pavillon de l'arsenal
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