Paris

Capital of France. Travel note: Paris. (File named “(Literary)” to avoid clashing with the Travel note’s name.)

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	setting	A few March days of rude bakers, homicidal traffic and showy architecture, with flashbacks to 1972 and his honeymoon.
How ‘15-Minute Cities’ Will Change the Way We Socialise	Peter Yeung	subject	The city remade as a cluster of villages under the 15-minute-city plan.
Not the End of the World	Hannah Ritchie	setting	Ritchie recounts attending COP21 in Paris in 2015, where the 1.5C target unexpectedly entered the final agreement.

I love to watch cities wake up and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.

Role: setting
In the book: Chapter 4. On impulse (“Hell, Bill, go to Paris”) Bryson starts the trip proper here, in March. He layers memories over the present: the hostile Gare du Nord tourist booth and the “dead beaver” bakery of 1972, Katz twice bombed by birds on the Champs-Élysées, nearly dying while crossing the Place de la Concorde on his honeymoon, and dinner at Le Thermomètre on the Place de la République. Now he skips the queue-jammed Louvre, loves the Musée d’Orsay, and rants about the Pompidou Center, the Place de la Bastille crossings and the Arc de Triomphe’s thirteen converging roads. His first evening on the Île Saint-Louis and at Shakespeare and Company has its own notes.
Why it matters: Paris is where the book’s argument about cities starts: places “are for people,” and Paris architects build “for cars, for businesses, for developers.” It also sets up the running joke about the French, which pays off when a family shoves him into the gutter on his last night (“I could have hugged them”) and seventeen people try to steal his cab at the Gare de Lyon.
Not pinned separately: Centre Pompidou (the target of the architecture rant). ⚠️ No coordinate from a standard source could be fetched this run.

Source: How ‘15-Minute Cities’ Will Change the Way We Socialise · Original · Readwise highlight

“I discovered it’s possible to feel like you’re in a small village in Paris,” she says.

Role: subject
In the article: A resident who long “refused to admit” Paris was stressful found, confined to a kilometre from home in the spring 2020 lockdown, that her neighbourhood felt like a village. The article sets her experience against Mayor Hidalgo’s 15-minute-city plans (pedestrianised Seine quays, bike routes, green schoolyards), the planner Carlos Moreno’s ideas, and critics’ worries about inequality.
Why it matters: Paris is the test case the article holds up for cities that want to copy the model.

Source: Not the End of the World · Readwise highlight

In 2015, I went to Paris for the big, famous climate conference, COP21.

Role: setting
In the book: Ritchie recounts attending COP21 in Paris in 2015, where the 1.5C target unexpectedly entered the final agreement. She had given up on 2C and thought 1.5C delusional. The conference is the anchor for her later account of how studying pledge data shifted her to cautious optimism.
Why it matters: The setting is the personal hinge for the chapter’s optimism: seeing the target adopted there contrasts with her earlier fatalism. The argument rests on data trajectories, so the city itself is incidental; any summit venue would serve.