Until 2008, Nice was a medium-sized city of the Mediterranean. The dominant colour was blue – colour of the sea and of Yves Klein, a native son -, the international airport ranked as the second most important in France and the works of a number of famous names in the history of art were especially useful to attract tourism. The green revolution, which is refashioning the city as a place not only to visit but also to live in, has come on the back of a long-term strategy that has led to opening new parks, planting trees and laying new tram lines to connect the airport and rediscover the suburbs. Today, if we look at the map of this transformation from above, it is clear that the work is far from over: in the next five years, further demolition work is planned, to replace buildings of little historical value with new green spaces.
“Over the past twelve years the direction has changed, the city of Nice has developed into the green city of the Mediterranean,” explains Anne Ramos, the city’s current deputy mayor, in charge of urban planning. “The tourist economy is important in our area, but allowing a city to depend on one economic sector alone was not responsible. That is why, in 2008, we started a radical project of economic diversification”.
A revolution driven by an innovative sustainable development policy. Whilst maintaining its historical attachment to blue, the city’s attention is turning towards another colour: green.
The roadmap of this change has entailed two interlocking stages: two macro-phases, the first terminated in 2020 and the second which will last until 2025. Within this plan, a series of six-monthly steps involved individual neighbourhoods. A project of this scope, involving large areas of a city over a long period of time, with 15 years of ongoing construction, necessarily has to resolve the problem of striking a balance between the needs of the residents and the goal of achieving a new positioning vis-à-vis the tourists who only visit the city for a few days at a time. “The challenge was to anticipate possible crisis points, from traffic to the use of public spaces during the construction,” explains Anne Ramos. “One of the ways we achieved this was by regularly organizing public consultation on the main development projects. The entire construction phase was carried out taking into account the quality of urban functions, of daily life in the city”.
The starting point for Nice’s green revolution was the Promenade du Paillon, opened in 2013. 12 hectares of green space in the city centre, replacing an obsolete bus station and a huge surface car park. Today, the Promenade du Paillon is one of the most popular parks in France, where architecture and biodiversity coexist, and it has carved out a space for itself by becoming the urban equivalent of the Promenade des Anglais, the long, historic seafront promenade conceived within the ambit of the mid-19th century master plan.
At the same time, building sites have been opened in the streets of the city centre, where the space between residential buildings was reserved for cars and buses. Today, in most of these streets only one lane has been maintained for cars, while the rest of the surface is now occupied by cycle paths and public green areas. The almost complete disappearance of buses and the replacement of bus lanes with protected cycle paths, was made possible by the introduction of the new tram lines: currently three, with a fourth under construction. Line 1 is traditional and overground, while Line 2, opened in 2019, created a direct link between the tourist port and the airport, on opposite sides of the city. The trams on Line 2, which are ochre, colour chosen by public consultation, are powered by batteries. This was a way to avoid any electrical infrastructure interfering with the urban landscape.
The new tramway was paved with 77,000 square metres of turf along the tracks and 2,400 new trees. They also brought the suburbs, which hitherto suffered from problems linked to isolation , closer to the city centre and causing a steep rise in the housing market. An average rise of 20%, initially on the basis of track maps alone, and we will have to wait the next few years to see whether the promises were solid enough to justify the growth.
Undoubtedly, the immediate beneficiary of this plan, summed up in the slogan “1 tree for every 5 inhabitants”, has been air quality: since the arrival of tram line 2, traffic on the Promenade des Anglais was reduced by 10%, and by 22% along the Avenue de la Californie, and emissions of CO2 and particulates consequently decreased by 65%.
In addition to designer Ora Ito, who grew up in Nice and Marseilles, over the past twelve years landscape architects and urban planners from all over the world have been involved: Michel Pena, who designed the Promenade du Paillon, Spanish architect Joseph Lluis Mateo, Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and French architects Jean Nouvel and Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who were involved in the construction of the Great Park on the Plain du Var.
The latter is a suburban area where business and social policy are working hand-in-hand, to achieve a vision that successfully combines sustainability and economics. With the project for the Plaine du Var and the development of the Eco-Valley west of Nice, 6,500 jobs have been created to date and a further 30,000 are estimated for the coming years: from industry to trade, from services to research and the environment.
An important role has been played by technology, but rather than pursuing the idea of the smart city, technology is seen here as a good reason to attract businesses. The Côte d’Azur has always been attentive to this aspect, since the creation of the Sophia-Antipolis district, the French Silicon Valley, in the 1960s. Technology can be a strong ally of the environment. Today, the entire city of Nice is equipped with sensors that measure air quality in real time, in order to provide policy makers with an objective measuring tool. Moreover, the Port of Nice, one of the Mediterranean ports most committed to combating air pollution, is considered Europe’s first intelligent port. A predominantly tourist port, it has been equipped with electric lines to allow yachts to switch off their engines and reduce emissions.
Bus lanes have been replaced by protected cycle paths, and where there used to be car parks – most of them underground – there are now bicycle stations. The Vélo Bleu, the public bicycle rental service, has more than 1,500 bikes and 2,000 docking stations, a good number of which have been converted to electric: the e-Vélobleu bikes. In this case too, the focus was on sustainable transport as a driver of business development. “Our Plan Vélo”, explains Anne Ramos, “not only aims to encourage citizens to leave their cars in the garage and take up cycling, but also to create a bicycle economy, with companies operating and developing in this area. To promote this we often plan events and partnering opportunities between businesses, associations and schools.” As a result, early in the morning you can often see students arriving at the city’s high schools on a rented Vélo Bleu.
But what is the colour of sound, or rather noise? While building urban parks and new tram lines means making a city greener, noise pollution is not visible but it is there, especially in France, the third country after the United States and Italy for noise levels in urban centres. Over the next few months a number of acoustic radars, called “jellyfish” because of their shape, will be installed in Nice. These devices are equipped with microphones that capture the noise levels emitted by cars and scooters/mopeds and, should the parameters be exceeded, vehicles that do not comply will be photographed and fined. “We are fighting against all forms of pollution,” explains Anne Ramos, “and that includes significantly reducing the number of people exposed to noise pollution. The plan for the next five years is to remove more than 68 decibels from the urban environment. The metropolitan services are working with the Ministry to carry out this experiment”.
The collaboration between the central government and the city, however, has also had its drawbacks. The Covid emergency has increased Mayor Christian Estrosi’s desire for decentralisation and autonomy. Having both hands free would not only allow the local administration to be closer to the needs of the public, but would also mean the possibility to experiment these new frontiers – ecology, economics, technology – with more flexibility.
Different reasons have led to Nice’s transformation into the green city of the Mediterranean. There are, of course, reasons related to well-being, which will have an impact on health costs: the aim is to reduce emissions by 55% throughout the city by 2030, and to abolish the use of fossil fuels by 2050. There’s also a financial reason to do with the city’s income: for a city competing globally with major tourism and luxury destinations, which means a high quality of life, repositioning was necessary. To leave the past behind and show tourists and residents that here and now you can live at your best. “Yet, this repositioning is nothing new,” notes Anne Ramos: “At a time when the climate challenge is on the agenda for all western urban areas, the city of Nice has been a pioneer, over the last 10 years, of a model of sustainable development that reconciles growth, employment and respect for the planet.”
In the city, nature is becoming ever more evident by the day, by the semester, bang on schedule. And all of these trees are destined to keep growing.