On a quiet tributary of the river Seine, 10km away from Paris’s centre, a barge loaded up with containers is getting ready to set off from the harbour of Bonneuil-sur-Marne. The industrial landscape of the harbour owned by the Paris port authority clashes with the surrounding bucolic scenery: the river Marne was a popular bathing spot until the 1970s, when swimming was forbidden because of pollution.
The barge – whose containers are filled with grocery goods ready to be dispatched to stores and sold – is the centrepiece of an ambitious project that is slowly putting the river Seine back at the forefront of Paris’s urban logistics. French grocery retailer Franprix’s pioneering delivery scheme supplies 135 of its 350 Parisian stores via the Seine, taking as many as 2,600 lorries off the city’s roads each year.
And there is room for more: Franprix alludes to the possibility of stocking most of its Parisian stores via water. As Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo openly puts the breaking up of car culture at the top of her agenda, are innovative schemes such as “Franprix en Seine” the future of urban transportation?
“We’re the only grocery retailer worldwide to use river transport for the final leg of our goods’ journey. We are pioneers,” says Stéphane Tuot, Franprix’s head of logistics.
The supermarket chain launched its scheme in 2012, with significant financial and political support from the European Union, the French state, the Parisian region and the port of Paris. “The vast majority of our stores are in Paris and its suburbs, forming a dense network. Our main warehouse is a few kilometres away from the city centre, close to Bonneuil-sur-Marne, one of Paris’s main ports. Relying on the Seine seemed logical.”
The company does not hide the fact that, even with some financial support from public stakeholders, it is much more expensive to transport goods via the river instead of the road. Why do it then?
“We want to be ahead of the game; there are more and more constraints on transportation via lorries, and it will only increase in the future,” says Tuot, mentioning the ban on diesel vehicles from 2020, and the possibility of a Parisian congestion charge by the end of Mayor Hidalgo’s term in 2021.
The Seine’s identity is much more complex than the cliche of a quiet city river cornered by tourism. The touristic aspect of the Seine’s economy is indeed strong: with 8 million passengers transported each year, Paris is the busiest inland harbour in the world. But with 20m tonnes of goods conveyed each year, it is also the second largest in Europe for merchandise.
After three hours of journey, two locks and 21km of navigation, Franprix’s barge arrives at the Port de la Bourdonnais, a tiny facility squeezed between the Eiffel Tower and the Musée du Quai Branly. The harbour offers two attributes and activities: a pier for bateaux mouches (open excursion boats) on one hand; on the other, a bijou container terminal used by the construction industry and Franprix.
Tuot says his company’s scheme is far from having reached its full capacity: “There is room to have much more merchandise transiting via the Seine, and we hope to announce new partnerships in the near future. In the long term, if we’re accompanied by public bodies and the right investments, there’s room to deliver all of our 350 Parisian stores via the Seine – that’s totally doable.”
The scheme has already demonstrated its efficiency by taking lorries of the road: Franprix calculated it saves the equivalent of 300,000km of road transit, almost 9,000 times the length of Paris’s ring road.
While it remains a drop in an ocean of pollution, the city looks at such urban logistic solutions with great interest. In her city hall office, Paris deputy mayor Célia Blauel, in charge of sustainable development and water, says that the Seine and Paris’s canals are key to their strategy for a greener and more sustainable Paris. The socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë (2001-2014) and his successor have both supported controversial plans to get rid of the motorways that run along the Seine and give the riverbanks back to pedestrians.
According to Blauel, more will be done to promote leisure and tourism for the Seine, for instance, an objective to allow Parisians to bathe in the Seine by 2030. But enhancing the role of the Seine as an infrastructure will also be crucial. “More cars and lorries is not the solution for Paris, we need to get rid of that way to navigate the city.”
While schemes such as Franprix en Seine remain notable exceptions, the role of the river Seine in Paris’s future is about to benefit from a significant boost. Following strong interest around the urban design competition “Reinvent Paris” – which saw international teams of urbanists and architects contending to redevelop 23 sites in Paris – City Hall confirmed to The Guardian that Mayor Hidalgo will, on 14 March, announce “Reinvent the Seine”, a similar scheme focusing on 40 sites all along the river.
The instigator of Reinvent Paris, Deputy-mayor Jean-Louis Missika, a sociologist-turned-politician who is serving his third term in office, believes every global city needs the sea, adding that, “The Greater Paris needs to rely on the Seine to design a ‘blue framework’ from Paris to Le Havre.”
This idea has gained momentum since Paris-based architect Antoine Grumbach proposed in 2009 to design a Greater Paris with the Seine as its spine, on a Paris-Rouen-Le Havre axis. With this grand design, Grumbach, who in 1996 also won a competition to design a (never-built) “garden bridge” over the Thames in London, proposed to transform Paris into a port city like New York or Shanghai.
“The competition Reinvent the Seine, developed hand in hand with the cities of Rouen and Le Havre, will be about casting a new light on to the Seine,” Missika explains. “It will be about enabling architects, urbanists and citizens to dream, and have crazy ideas about the Seine and its future.”
Yet as Paris rediscovers the charms and assets of the Seine, the scenic river risks a clash of competing activities — on the one hand, riverbanks reclaimed for pedestrians, floating structures such as swimming pools and hotels, and the popular Paris Plage, which transforms the Seine into an urban beach every summer; on the other, the rise of river-based urban logistics and the building of new facilities, along with ever-increasing passenger traffic.
“One thing is certain: today the Seine is Paris’s most attractive public space,” Missika says. “That is why we need to get urbanists and architects thinking about how to anticipate and resolve these conflicts.”
Today, however, Franprix’s lonely barge with its emptied containers is quietly sailing back to the port of Bonneuil-sur-Marne, while traffic jams continue to build up on the Seine’s soon-to-be-pedestrianised riverbanks.
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