I’ve been avoiding La Défense. I’d visited once, more than twenty five years ago, in a cold spring laden with misery that had nothing to do with Paris. I remembered a forbidding vista of grey, windswept concrete leading to the cavernous empty space of the Grande Arche. I was in no hurry to return. Yesterday, after three years in Paris I decided it was time for another look.
I’d heard good things about recent developments at La Défense but a business district of gleaming skyscrapers isn’t my natural habitat. I was prepared to be disappointed. Emerging from the metro at Esplanade de La Défense, a flight of stairs leads up to the Bassin Takis – a wide, shallow pool dotted with lamppost like sculptures. (On a still, bright day the reflections would be dramatic). Across the pool the distant Grande Arche is dwarfed by its taller new neighbours and the axis leading to the arch looks surprisingly green.
(Click on the first photo to view the gallery)
So far, so green and pleasant. Since my visit I’ve been looking up the development of public open space at La Défense, discovering the gradual development from trees in isolated boxes to real green places. Green doesn’t come cheap here. The entire district with forty hectares of pedestrian space is built on a vast concrete slab, raised above the metro lines and service roads, so planting beds have to be constructed and filled with imported soil.
Up towards the Grande Arche there are surviving reminders of the meager beds that were earlier attempts at ‘landscaping’. The miserable shrubs and trees that survive in them are too small and isolated to have any real impact on the hard greyness of the built environment. Brightly coloured tiles on the plant boxes didn’t help much either!


Tucked away at a lower level, not far from the Grande Arche there’s an incongruous small vegetable garden, clearly brand new this season. Neatly framed and inaccessible it’s more vegetable art than a serious attempt at horticultural production but it may be a sign of change in the wind. People need plants.
August 9, 2017 at 5:09 pm
Fascinating. I hadn’t even heard of La Defense until I read this posting. Looking at some older pictures, I can see why you didn’t want to return to it. It must have been a depressing place. Purpose-built neighborhoods and business districts often are. And planners, particularly in the era when this was planned, often put in green space as an afterthought. That thinking has changed as people realized the importance of parks and green space. We now know that good parks have both health and economic benefits and should be part of any good city or neighborhood plan. Creating green space on a concrete slab is challenging, but it looks like the city authorities are making progress.
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August 9, 2017 at 5:23 pm
The original architects and planners of this district had great faith in concrete. Public sculpture was planned in from the beginning but trees and green space seem to have been very much an afterthought. In the later stages of the development the buildings have got taller but at least the green space is taken seriously now.
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August 11, 2017 at 12:40 pm
During the same ’91 trip, after strolling around Pigalle, Montmartre and other better known parts of Paris, I saw an ad featuring La Défense. It created such a counter landscape with its grandiose skyscrapers and that new Arch that we immediately decided to visit. It was quite a sight, especially from the top of the Arch from where the old Arc is visible. I took my parents and sister back there years later, they were equally impressed. After parents left for the hotel, sis and I joined the local drummers and tried to sell them a watch we’d found on the ground earlier. We had a nice intercultural exchange. And then sis and I went to hear Urban Species live. Always a grand time in Paris (well, twice).
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August 11, 2017 at 2:26 pm
I’m slowly being converted to the Grande Arche. Next time I must go up to see the view from the top.
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