It’s only 10am but the heat is already radiating off the asphalt at the École Riblette, a primary school on the outskirts of Paris. Sébastien Maire, the city’s chief resilience officer, points to the school’s lower courtyard, a classic heat trap: surrounded by concrete walls that reflect sunlight inside. Last June, the courtyard hit 55C (131F), reports The Guardian.
“For three days, school activities stopped,” Maire says. “It was not possible for the children to study, nor to go into the schoolyard. We would forbid them because it’s 55 degrees – you can fry an egg on the ground.”
The École Riblette is now a guinea pig for Project Oasis, a plan to convert the concrete schoolyards of Paris into “islands of cool”. The goal is to provide respite in periods of extreme heat, and perhaps even bring down temperatures across a city with a desperate shortage of green space. Just 9.5% of Paris is given over to parks and gardens – the lowest proportion of any European city. (By comparison, London boasts 33% green space and Madrid 35%.)
Maire explains how the courtyards at this school will be transformed: a green wall here, a vegetable planter there, expanded areas of shade and special drainable concrete surfaces that can absorb water when it rains.
If all goes to plan, all of Paris’s 800 schools will be transformed into green spaces by 2040. The City of Paris plan is also being facilitated by 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), a project of the Rockefeller Foundation, which also supports Guardian Cities.
But if the trees and planters are uncontroversial, the next two steps of the scheme could prove more difficult for the city to sell. Maire first wants to open up these newly built green spaces to vulnerable people during heatwaves, and eventually wants the general public to enjoy them too – albeit outside school hours.
“By 2050, we’ll have 800 cool spots in the city using school infrastructure,” he says, arguing that it is a better alternative than taking vulnerable people to supermarkets and churches.
In Paris, which has the highest population density in Europe, no one lives more than 200 metres from a school, meaning the plan could dramatically increase access to green space for many residents.
Lina Liakou, the regional director for Europe at 100RC, says of the new green spaces: “They don’t just address the environmental challenges, but also improve social cohesion and create a better environment for the people around them.”
That holistic approach stemmed from an 18-month resilience-building process that the city underwent in collaboration with 100RC, attempting to think in a more interconnected way – not just focusing on climate after the Paris Agreement, but also “the social and inclusion issues that have so clearly impacted the city”, says Andrew Brenner, associate director of global communications at 100RC. “The fact that the city is looking at the oases as not climate interventions – tackling a singular challenge, in this case heat – but rather resilience interventions with multiple benefits, and elaborating that from the start, is a huge development.”