Many years ago I worked on a campus with many "car-free" areas, but really big items like construction equipment, event tents, catering equipment, server racks, or industrial restaurant equipment still used a van or truck, typically with someone walking ahead to clear pedestrians and sometimes laying down boards if it required driving over grass.

My experience has been that most "car-free" areas in cities operate similarly -- they use a combination of unlockable bollards, speed restrictions to 5-10mph, zones for active loading/unloading but no parking, and/or no through routes to reduce the number of motor vehicles. But there are rarely zero motor vehicles.

> Have fun moving big items with hand carts.

If you don't have steep hills it's trivially easy to move moderately large items like couches, washing machines, and computer equipment with an unpowered platform truck. If there are steep hills and you're a skinny IT tech like I was you'd probably want a platform truck with electric assist or an NEV (aka golf cart). On the aforementioned campus it was significantly easier to borrow a platform truck or golf cart to move big items than to file a request and wait for moving folks to come with a van or box truck, so we became proficient at moving large items ourselves. It turns out with the right setup it is easier than most people think, sometimes even easier than figuring out how to lift the equipment into the bed of a box truck.

Cargo bikes (both manual and electric), smaller electric propulsion carts, and similar hardware solve for this trivially. They're also cheaper than light autos. Woohoo!

https://pulse.dbschenker.com/eu/xxl-cargo-bike/

https://www.bicycling.com/bikes-gear/a25054215/best-cargo-bi...

https://store.graniteind.com/category/power-carts/indoor-out...

Amsterdammer here. Totally doable, helps if the hills aren’t too steep. Powered vehicles do come and go where I am (street cleaning etc) and it’s possible for planned things like house moves or demolitions. I imagine Paris will do similar stuff.

It takes some bureaucracy but if there is no other way of course you can get permission.