Okay, so we know that Paris has transformed itself from a car city into a biking city. Between 2015-2020 the City doubled its number of bike lanes. Then in 2021, it announced that it wanted to become a "100% cycling city" and further add to its bike network. Today, it has one of the busiest bike routes in the world and more people cycle than drive. The Globe and Mail reported, here, that last year 11.2% of trips in Paris proper were made by bike, compared to only 4.3% by car. "You would not be wrong to call it a war on the car," Marcus Gee writes. However, the result was a "victory for the city."
At the same time, we know how people will respond to this data. Lots of people will read this article and immediately say, "yeah, but that's Paris, where the average highs and lows in January are 8 and 3 degrees, respectively. It simply won't work in Toronto where our January highs and lows average 0 and -7 degrees. We have snow to contend with; they don't." And of course, they wouldn't be entirely wrong in this argument. Cycling does tend to decline in the winter months in most cities. (Note: The months of April to November in Toronto are just as warm or warmer than Paris in the winter.)
But just for fun, let's look at Oulu, Finland which has been called the "winter cycling capital of the world." Oulu has a population of around 210,000 people, an extremely low population density of approximately 150 people per km2, and January temperatures that average between -7 and -15 degrees. And yet: 40% of residents report cycling on a weekly basis, more than 40% of trips to school are by bike, 22% of all trips in the inner city are by bicycle, and this number remains at 12% throughout the winter. These Oululainens are clearly hardy people.
Here's a video comparing winter vs. summer cycling in Oulu.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't generally cycle in January and February. Partially because it's cold and partially because I don't want road salts all over my business. But the correct framing isn't that it's not possible in a city like Toronto; it's that I'm too soft. That, and we need to invest in the right infrastructure if we want more people to do it.
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
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
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