From grey to green: the plan to turn Paris’s zinc rooftops into gardens
Architecture trio says adding roof terraces to French capital’s buildings could boost biodiversity and tackle summer heat
From the roof of the eight-floor residential building in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, you can see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. It’s the space between these icons, however, that the Roofscapes team have marched me up the stairs to see; the zigzagging roofs that make up a vast area of unused, ignored and mostly unseen space.
This is what Eytan Levi, Tim Cousin and Olivier Faber believe could be key to preventing the city from overheating after a series of sweltering summers when temperatures in the French capital reached a record high of 42.6C.