A series about how cities are changing, and their impact on everyday life.
As the sky began to turn lemon-yellow one night last month, 50 or so Parisians marched to Rue de l’Aude in the city’s south and gathered in a nautical-themed loft space filled with seats.
Some of the attendees were close friends or acquaintances; some spy on each other on the street on several occasions. For others, it was the first time they had met. But everyone fulfilled their entry request: bring cheese.
“I took a tire of Époisses because my wife is from that region,” said one attendee, Benjamin Dard, in reference to a famously spicy and unpleasant type of cow’s milk from Burgundy.
“Everyone buys something different that relates to them, in a way that pays tribute to the diversity of France,” said Mr. Dard. Quoting a former French president, he added, “It’s like de Gaulle said: ‘How can you govern a country where there are 300 different types of cheese?’”
The meetup, known as Talking Cheese — which combines plenty of dairy goods and talks by local residents on their subjects of expertise — is one of a dizzying array of activities run by the Republic of Super Neighborsa grass-roots initiative whose territory covers approximately 50 streets in the 14th arrondissement, a majority residential district on the Seine’s Left Bank.
More than 1,200 of these so-called Super Neighbors communicate through 40 WhatsApp groups dedicated to queries like finding a cat sitter or asking for help fixing broken appliances. They hold weekly brunches, after-work drinks and community gatherings where older residents share memories with younger generations. As much fun as it gets, the group also hosts an annual party — La Table d’Aude — for residents on a table 400 meters long, about 440 yards, that runs down the middle of a street.
Started in 2017, the hyperlocal experiment is the brainchild of Patrick Bernard, a local resident and former journalist, who argues that the functioning of cities can be completely improved if urban policy drills down to “the most local entity in a city.”
“The urban strategy must focus on these microneighborhoods, or three-minute villages, as I like to call them,” said Mr. Bernard, estimating that Paris could house 150 of these urban villages based on its population and geography. “Conviviality is a dormant treasure. When we awaken a sense of place and community, the citizens and fabric of the city change.”
The Paris project, whose motto is to change neighbors who interact five times a day to those who do so 50 times a day, is at the forefront of what urban planners say is a rapidly expanding movement. to reclaim cities from scratch and reorganize cities. living in a hyperlocal prism of close contact, mutual support and a sense of neighborliness.
Our immediate neighborhoods, according to advocates, are the most effective platforms where people can create resilience and potentially alleviate the growing number of crises facing urban populations, including loneliness, homelessness food security, extreme heat and social unrest linked to inequality — as witnessed in the riots that rocked Paris and other French cities this summer. In other words, they say, the cities of the future must be cities of villages, public spaces and neighborhoods.
In Paris, where minority residents often say they are pushed to the margins, socially and geographically, Mr. Bernard says his goal is to leave no one behind. There are Black, Muslim and East Asian members of Super Neighbors. Participation is free. In the past, neighbors have come together to pay the rent of a Malian refugee who joined them.
“The community needs to be at the center of the city’s development,” said Ramon Marrades, the director of Placemaking Europe, a network of European organizations aiming to revitalize public spaces. “Proper inclusive policy allows residents to become actors in the community, to have a sense of anchoring and to invest emotionally.”
Much has been made of the 15-minute city, a very popular urban design concept centered around providing residents with all their basic needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. But the challenge lies in how to implement this great vision locally. While the 15-minute city provides critical physical infrastructure, the three-minute city is about shaping it around the needs and character of the community.
“We need to develop a process to link the two,” said Mr. Marrades, who is in the middle of a two years of collaboration with 15 European cities including Helsinki, Finland, and Cork, Ireland, to embed hyperlocality and community building at the core of urban policies.
Many cities around the world riff on this theme of hyperlocality. Barcelona creates 503 Superblocks — 400-by-400-meter microneighborhood dedicated to community projects, green space and mobility — throughout the city. Across Sweden, a one-minute city plan aims to make all streets “healthy, sustainable and vibrant” by 2030, putting things like movable street furniture. In pilot stages, it led people in cities, including Stockholm, to spend 400 percent more time outdoors.
Other cities, like Vancouver, which has been built around a streetcar grid since 1886, already have the perfect canvas for promoting neighborhood-ness. “Hyperlocal is the solution for social stability,” said Scott Hein, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a former urban planner for Vancouver’s City Hall. Mr. Hein envisions the city as made up of 120 “community areas,” areas that each contain a school, mixed housing and a commercial zone for shops and jobs.
Policy makers around the world are increasingly supporting the hyperlocal approach. In June, UN Habitat, which focuses on sustainable urban development, started the Global Observatory of Sustainable Proximity to advance this urban planning model, which it describes as “a key enabler capable of fostering human well-being and effective climate action.”
Back in Paris, the authorities in June voted anew Local Urbanism Plan featuring several measures aimed at strengthening neighborhoods, making it easier to open local businesses, adding more limits on short-term vacation rentals and banning “dark shops,” closed-off deliveries hub for e-commerce that critics say does not provide benefits to local residents. The city’s Resilience Strategy report said last year that encouraging “neighbors to occupy and revitalize public spaces” could help turn the “challenges of the century” into opportunities.
“Paris has made proximity the norm, even with a change in mayor,” said Carlos Moreno, the Paris-based professor behind the 15-minute city concept, who has advised cities as diverse as Medellín, Colombia, and Dakar, Senegal. “This will allow it to be regenerated on three levels: ecological, economic and social.”
Republic of Super Neighbors’ Talking Cheese highlights the surprising wealth of knowledge found in a neighborhood. Mr. Dard, a fact-checking and verification expert who works for the French TV channel TF1, spoke at an event about the phenomenon of fake news, and previously a neighbor spoke about working as a magistrate in a criminal court. Soon, an astrophysicist will talk about black holes.
“It’s very beautiful here,” said Mr. Dard, whose neighbors have recently been taking care of her cats and watering her plants while she’s on vacation. “The ambience is unique.”
Marie-Bénédicte Loze, 37, a charity worker who moved to the area last year, lost her purse a few months ago – but a neighbor returned it intact. “The unity in this place is beautiful,” he said. “It’s not always like that in a city.”
But the group has loftier goals, including health, mobility and climate. By encouraging residents to become emotionally and physically invested in the public spaces they live in, Mr. Bernard argues, they will be less likely to throw away trash or cigarette butts, reducing cleanup costs. .
“Conviviality is an economic actor,” he said.
Working with nonprofits Les Alchimistes, the group placed several compost bins throughout the neighborhood. Used by 800 Super Neighbors, they process 60 tons of organic waste a year, an abnormally high 98 percent of which is properly deposited. Such was the success of the project that City Hall agreed to spend 31,000 euros, or about $34,000, to install eight more.
With support from the city Participatory Budget, which allows citizens to vote on municipal spending, the Republic of Super Neighbors has revived a forgotten public square into a vibrant event space, and it is applying for funding to purchase communal which is an e-bike charger and an electric cargo bike for the transportation of residents. local goods. In the future, the group hopes to open a medical center dedicated to local needs.
Looking further afield, the group explores ways it can vision of cities carved in the image of, and strengthened by the bonds between, their inhabitants can be replicated and enlarged. It believes the answer is the creation of trained and paid roles — called Friends of the Neighborhood — to coordinate each district.
“People are starting to listen,” Mr. Bernard said. “Everyone wants their neighborhood to be like ours. Now we need to figure out how to make our approach more systematic and adapt it to the different challenges and contexts that every city in the world has.”
