The Petite Ceinture_A new linear garden for Paris
Final Degree
Roma Tre
La Petite Ceinture, the small belt, is the 33 km long ring railway in Paris, built in 1851 and decommissioned in 1934.
In the decades after being decommissioned, it has profoundly changed: from the city's development infrastructure, into a rigid line of fracture of urban continuity, obstacle to the porosity of the many complex spatial, environmental and social relationships that are broken up, often generating situations of degradation. At the same time, isolation and abandonment allowed the uncontrolled and spontaneous development of clandestine experimental activities and uses of pioneer vegetation, the mixture of which overtime gave the route an important potential endowment of new urban values.
Today, the disused railway heritage has become the object of new attention. Hence the idea of transforming the Petite Ceinture into an unprecedented linear public space at the scale of the entire city, hybridizing the characteristics of a large urban garden with the restoration of the original function, using well-tested forms of soft mobility. The result is an infrastructure - railway and landscape - that connects all the major parks already existing in the eastern quadrant of Paris, ringing a succession of public spaces among the most important of the city, of which it constitutes a new backbone.