Paris is experiencing a heatwave at the moment and so my social feeds are naturally filled with people dressed as Spider-Man jumping into the Canal Saint-Martin. First and foremost, it's great to see so many people swimming in an urban body of water. I think this is quickly becoming table stakes for cities, which is why, last year, Globizen became a signatory to the Swimmable Cities Alliance.

Though, to be fair, many or most urban bodies of water, including the Canal Saint-Martin, are clean sometimes, and less clean at other times. It depends on the precipitation levels and whether any combined sewers have backed up. But today, it's clean and Parisians are enjoying themselves.

Now, here's a quick history lesson. The Canal Saint-Martin was initially constructed as a freshwater solution to poor drinking water and overall sanitation concerns in the centre of Paris. Napoleon I ordered the construction of the 4.6 km canal connecting the Canal de l'Ourcq to the River Seine in 1802 and funded it with a new wine tax (of course). Construction lasted until 1825.

By the 1860s, Napoleon III and his urban planner, Baron Haussmann, had started their large-scale overhaul of Paris, and Haussmann viewed the canal as an inconvenient feature getting in the way of his preferred urban design. So he buried nearly half of the canal underneath a massive, vaulted brick tunnel. This continues to exist today, and one of these days I'd love to do a boat tour through it.

By the 1960s, boat traffic had dwindled on the canal and urban planners at the time proposed what urban planners at the time proposed, which was to fill it all in and create a four-lane highway. As I understand it, the French equivalent of Jane Jacobs wasn't there to stop such a project from going ahead; it was instead simply an issue of finances.

Whatever the case, it gave the canal and surrounding area the opportunity to transform from a gritty industrial relic into the trendy Parisian bobo district that it is today. Like many aspects of the modern city, utility and industry are giving way to leisure and lifestyle. This would have been impossible to predict at the start of the 19th century, and it could have very easily turned out differently.

Cover photo via Wikipedia