“Do you want more garden streets in Paris? » In essence, the new question to which Parisians will have to answer on March 23, 2025, should more or less be formulated as follows. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor (PS) of the capital, announced this Wednesday, during her wishes, the holding of a new citizen vote. Which will therefore have the theme of garden streets, a greening system that the municipality wanted (in 2023) to increase to around twenty by the end of the mandate.
The principle of the vote is simple: submit to the vote of Parisians registered on the electoral lists a measure important for their daily life, in order to know if they are in favor of it. The theme of this new question “is certainly a little less divisive than the place of SUVs or scooters, but it is more structuring for the city”, it is argued within the Paris town hall.
“10 square meters of green space per inhabitant”
This ecological announcement comes a few weeks after the vote, in the Paris Council, of the City's bioclimatic Local Urban Planning Plan (PLU). A flagship measure of Anne Hidalgo's second mandate which aims in particular to “offer 10 square meters of green spaces per inhabitant”, or some 300 hectares free to create.
According to figures from Apur (Parisian urban planning workshop), 31% of the capital's territory is today “vegetated”, including 1,840 hectares in the woods of Boulogne (16th century) and Vincennes (12th century). The 730 parks and public gardens alone constitute 520 hectares of this greening of Paris. The City also mentions the “650 kilometers of roads planted with more than 106,000 trees” and the “145 hectares” of green roofs and walls in Paris. According to the municipality, more than “170,000 trees” must be planted by 2026.
In this ambition to green the capital, the municipality is also highlighting what it describes as an “urban forest”. After the Place de la Catalogne and its 4,000 m² of reforestation, it is on the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville that a new “urban forest”, a true showcase of the City, will emerge in the coming months.
Plants after scooters or SUVs
This new question is the third submitted to a vote by residents in just under two years. The first was organized in April 2023. It resulted in the ban on self-service electric scooters in the capital, since 89.03% of the votes went in this direction. A measure that came into force from the following September 1.
February 4, 2024, new call to the polls. This time to find out whether or not we should charge more for SUV parking. Objective: limit the presence of these vehicles deemed by the municipality to be too bulky, too dangerous, too polluting. Here again, Parisians voted in favor, but this time by a narrow majority (54.55% of the votes). A price overhaul deployed last October.
Participation still quite low
The low mobilization during this second vote ― as well as the convoluted wording of the question ― gave rise to debate, since only 78,121 Parisians had spoken out, out of approximately 1.4 million voters. Although the participation rate for the vote on scooters was also quite low, 103,084 voters still gave their opinion.
Since 2024, district town halls have also had the possibility of organizing, during these votes, a parallel vote on a more local issue. Several elected officials took the opportunity to survey their constituents. Pedestrianization and revegetation in the 8th century, solidarity food fund in the 20th… Next March, there should be several doing it again. Already, in Paris Center for example, Ariel Weil (PS) is thinking of questioning voters on the advisability of banning tourist buses in the heart of the capital.
