What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
Besides being a neat visualization, one remarkable thing (to me) is that this is one of the few computer vision tasks where the state-of-the-art is still the old hand-designed descriptors--specifically HOG. The attempts to re-do this work with deep learning haven't worked so well. The closest I know is https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06343 , which I've never even seen applied to cities. The problem is actually that deep nets have too much invariance: they can classify whether a facade is in Paris or not, but there's no easy way to separate out different kinds of facades.
If anyone has questions about this work, post below and I'll try to answer.
Usually a city lives and changes to adapt itself to its times, and Paris was no exception... Until the 19th century.
Now the local government wants to "preserve" it for the joy of tourists, to the detriments of locals. Housing is scarce causing high prices. Buildings are old and inconvenients.
Paris is a museum-city. Designed for tourists.
Keep in mind that Paris, without near suburbs ("proche banlieue") is only 105 km² and as written, has been mostly rebuild by Haussmann (following Napoleon III orders) in the late 18XX, when I.e. London is something like 1500 km² ... so comparison may be difficult
There were deviations from the rules throughout the ages, especially on the left bank with the newer, taller towers (Place d'Italie, Montparnasse, Berges de Seine). But these deviations were always one off, pushed through by an ambitious leader that burned off a lot of political capital.
https://www.google.com/maps/@22.2816017,114.156159,3a,75y,31...
Some streets in Paris are narrow, others aren't. Streets with two-way road traffic are wide enough.
(OP is not talking about shadow on one side of the road. They mean perma shadow the whole day long.)
Rio de Janeiro is located at latitude 22.9 South while Paris is located at 48.8 North. The solar exposure of those cities throughout the year is very different.
The original post was about making taller buildings in paris without wider streets. That would lead to permanent canyons.
It's no wonder we're kind of vaccinated against towers... I could add to the list: place des fêtes, Olympiades, les Orgues de Flandres...
The canopy at Les Halles also pretty much puts a stop to the rumour that new, massive constructions are not possible in Paris, let alone in the center of Paris.
Granted, context certainly matters and Beaubourg was, charitably put, rather controversial when it was under construction, but it's absolutely not a given that no renewal is possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Georges_Pompidou [2] https://www.citylab.com/design/2015/05/paris-the-canopy-fix/...
But weren't some cities in SV not allowing new buildings to "preserve the character of the city" as well?
Paris is one of the most dense city in the world, there's nothing which can solve that.
Clearly there are options, which aren't on the table because of preservationism and zoning.
[1] https://www.google.de/maps/@48.8575448,2.2997841,3a,75y,329....
Size of Manhattan: 59km^2 [2]
Density Paris: 21,000/km^2 [1]
Density Manhattan: 28,154/km^2 [2]
Comparing arrondissements with a larger area like Manhattan is not good. If you compare Manhattan's wards with Paris's arrondissements you get a clearer picture:
11th arrondissement: 41.500/km^2 [3]
Upper Westsides 25th district: 92.400/km^2 [4]
Looks like the visual comparison of stories works out quite well with regards to density
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris#Arron...
[4] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1KH824f7Bya0UVv...
There are dozens of open wide Rues, Avenues and Boulevards in Paris that don't have any dense housing compared to Manhattan or Hong Kong etc.
Hong Kong is incredibly dense and full of high rise buildings (Kowloon has 110,000 people/square mile) and streets aren't exactly wide. Seoul packs in 42,000 people per square mile without many significantly wide streets. Tokyo streets are often only suitable for one way traffic.
As a French living now in Canada, Paris streets are narrow in general, and especially the sidewalks are ridiculous, most of the space is for cars. One of the first thing to do would be to reclaim that street space for pedestrians and cyclists, which is an ongoing, slow and painful battle.
(The difference in sunlight exposure for pedestrians between an 8-story building and a 16-story building is not remotely as large than between an 8- and a 2-story building)
Because sunlight non-exposure is one of the pinnacles of unfounded, futile arguments against density.
For public health reasons, enable emergency and disaster response, contain potential propagation of collapses, enable large volumes of people to evacuate in a timely manner, etc.
Europe has lived with narrow streets for some centuries and learned to avoid that mistake. It's a shame that somr people have forgot or never learned those lessons.
Today people still value seeing the sky and freedom of movement. I have not been everywhere in North America but usually I saw that big buildings mean wide streets around them.
Moving goods.
> Moving people is what the metro is for.
People aren't the only thing that needs moved to support a city.
Since a few years there's a construction boom in and around the city. With the new subway lines to come (greater Paris), new neighborhoods are built everywhere.
Your vision of Paris is at least 50 years old...
It make the city center usually very uniform and, arguably, beautiful, but it can be annoying to live in.
I know what you're talking, and I know its a common design-pattern amongst architects and urban developers, but I think while uniformity can be beautiful, it certaintly isn't always. And more importantly: heterogenity can be beautiful as well.
It is the latter sentence that is somewhat avoided in many countries/cities zoning codes and is IMO just wrong. Compare the skylines of Manhattan/HongKong with the ones of Kowloon's monotone apartment building skylines in the outskirts. Or the picturesque Italian towns.
I could go on for lengths about it but there is an acknowledged dissent amongst planners to accept the fact, that in contrast to the "Paris-Way" the "London-Way" does also work. Interestingly, that often aligns amongst political views as well (Statism vs. Laissez-faire)
For the best contrast start at Nation and taking either the subway line 2 (north) or 6 (south), get off every two stations. Between Monceau, La Chappelle and Nation if you don't see a difference...
As you say there is quite a lot of architectural diversity already (I e.g. loved strolling through the Quartier Latin and discovering small side streets and different architectural patterns in buildings and neighborhoods), they just had more consistent city planning as compared to other cities (IMHO) so the differences are not as stark as e.g. in most US cities.
There are many high rises outside of the boulevard peripherique (the ring motorway separating inner and outer Paris), it’s just that most tourists never go there.
Also, many people live in the suburbs that are served by the RER lines, and these have a large degree of variety in both density and style. I suggest visiting e.g. Antony or Gif Sur Yvette (and The Valley of Chevreuse in general) to get an entirely different feeling of the larger Paris area.
Personally I don’t know what the city planners could reasonably do to increase the density of the city without destroying its character, as Paris intra muros is really fully developed already without virtually any empty space whatsoever (contrary to e.g Berlin where even today there’s tons of empty space even in the very center).
I’m not sure if increasing the density is always a good idea as well, as it doesn’t suffice to add more housing but you will have to scale all other required services as well (schools, supermarkets etc.) so growing the city outwards might be better (as area grows quadratically with radius).
BTW the uniformity of the buildings in Paris also stems from a regulation that requires most buildings to have black metal window sills in front of every window.
It's not a "nice" area in that sense, but it's rather enchanting to walk around, have a drink, or a bottle of wine on one of the bar boats and is growing in cultural experiences to be had.
Granted, I'd probably never have found it on my own if a virtually life long friend wouldn't be living in the area.
Coincidentally I'm off to Paris for the weekend come tomorrow evening and looking very much forward to it. :)
In case anyone is unaware, that is intentional. Look up Haussmann.
I wonder how many of these more ordinary objects or store fronts you could remove and still keep the aesthetic wonder of the place. Take out the garbage cans, the street lights, the cross walks, bring the buildings a little closer together or father apart. At what point does it's quality simply change?
Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5)
I picked London, but none of the others (which might just reflect my lack of knowledge of each city). What do others see in figure 6?
That's an effect I've seen with many deep learning things but that I don't understand.
However, it requires rectified, segmented training data, unlike the above.
With 0.0003% of people being affected, I'd argue that this so called "symptom" is hardly a noteworthy phenomenon.
Even the Eiffel tower looks better from a distance than close-up (mostly because it's really just a massive lump of steel). There are nice corners in Paris but if you haven't actually ever been to Paris before, you'll probably be disappointed by the overall experience.