Paris Turning Green With … Plants

The city of Paris and the Paris Region Lab have announced the selection of 30 projects that the city will fund under the Vegetation Innovations Initiative launched in March of this year. The Paris Region Lab is an association created by the city of Paris, whose mission is to promote creative and innovative public and private initiatives in Paris.

The winning ideas were primarily in the areas of biodiversity, urban agriculture and climate change innovations. The city will grant use of a variety of spaces – public land, government buildings, donors, museums, an old water-processing plant, or private buildings – to the businesses and non-profit associations who applied, to test their prototypes for a period up to 3 years.

The selection committee consisted of ten city councilors, who reviewed a wide range of creative proposals: communal planting spaces on terraces, chicken farm collectives in the city center, organic urban gardens on rooftops or vertical walls of sustainable ecosystems.

Our favorite?   Growing strawberries on building facades, that will be served in Paris restaurants.

The hope is that this initiative will turn Paris into an open-air laboratory to imagine, test and develop innovations that will spark a robust and much-needed ecological transformation in the city. More to come.

To see the list of the 30 winning proposals, visit the Paris Region Lab website