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What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

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Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#41

Post by s3m4j »

keiferski wrote: post #9

Anecdotally, after having lived in Paris for ~6 months, one of the most noticeable aspects of the city is its relative uniformity. Unlike Berlin, London, or Prague, you can wander for awhile in Paris and essentially see the same style of architecture and urban landscape repeated. It has something of an “endless” effect on your time perception.

Having lived there my whole life (26 years), have you walked ? Paris (stricto sensu) is small. You can walk the longest distance east-west in an afternoon, and buildings do change. Like comparing the 20th district with the 15th, have you not seen buildings change ? Montmartre and Montsouris ? There's not 2 hours of walking between these places.

For the best contrast start at Nation and taking either the subway line 2 (north) or 6 (south), get off every two stations. Between Monceau, La Chappelle and Nation if you don't see a difference...

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#42

Post by realusername »

woodpanel wrote: post #39
realusername wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you build taller buildings, you will need to have wider streets, thus resulting in the same density, it won't solve anything.

is it anecdotal or is it provable? There are dozens of open wide Rues, Avenues and Boulevards in Paris that don't have any dense housing compared to Manhattan or Hong Kong etc.

Yeah you can maybe put only 5 or 10 more skyscrapers by destroying the biggest empty spaces (there's not that many of them), what would be the point of that? It's not a dozen of skyscrapers which will solve the housing crisis.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#43

Post by forgotmypwagain »

s3m4j wrote: post #41
keiferski wrote: post #9

Anecdotally, after having lived in Paris for ~6 months, one of the most noticeable aspects of the city is its relative uniformity. Unlike Berlin, London, or Prague, you can wander for awhile in Paris and essentially see the same style of architecture and urban landscape repeated. It has something of an “endless” effect on your time perception.

Having lived there my whole life (26 years), have you walked ? Paris (stricto sensu) is small. You can walk the longest distance east-west in an afternoon, and buildings do change. Like comparing the 20th district with the 15th, have you not seen buildings change ? Montmartre and Montsouris ? There's not 2 hours of walking between these places. For the best contrast start at Nation and taking either the subway line 2…

Not sure why this is voted down as Paris intramuros is quite walkable as you said. With a velib (Paris municipal rental bike) you can probably go from South to North in 30-40 minutes.

As you say there is quite a lot of architectural diversity already (I e.g. loved strolling through the Quartier Latin and discovering small side streets and different architectural patterns in buildings and neighborhoods), they just had more consistent city planning as compared to other cities (IMHO) so the differences are not as stark as e.g. in most US cities.

There are many high rises outside of the boulevard peripherique (the ring motorway separating inner and outer Paris), it’s just that most tourists never go there.

Also, many people live in the suburbs that are served by the RER lines, and these have a large degree of variety in both density and style. I suggest visiting e.g. Antony or Gif Sur Yvette (and The Valley of Chevreuse in general) to get an entirely different feeling of the larger Paris area.

Personally I don’t know what the city planners could reasonably do to increase the density of the city without destroying its character, as Paris intra muros is really fully developed already without virtually any empty space whatsoever (contrary to e.g Berlin where even today there’s tons of empty space even in the very center).

I’m not sure if increasing the density is always a good idea as well, as it doesn’t suffice to add more housing but you will have to scale all other required services as well (schools, supermarkets etc.) so growing the city outwards might be better (as area grows quadratically with radius).

BTW the uniformity of the buildings in Paris also stems from a regulation that requires most buildings to have black metal window sills in front of every window.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#44

Post by tormeh »

realusername wrote: post #20
ovi256 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the rules meant to preserve the Haussmanian parts beloved by tourists are applied uniformly throughout the city, even in those neighborhoods without tourists which you mention. There were deviations from the rules throughout the ages, especially on the left bank with the newer, taller towers (Place d'Italie, Montparnasse, Berges de Seine). But these deviations were always one off, pushed through by an…

To build taller buildings, you would need much wider streets than what you have now, unless you want half of the city to be in a permanent shadow. This would not solve the housing issue. The density of Paris is close to the maximum possible already.

What's the point of building taller if you just increase the street width so total livable area per ground area is the same? That's nonsensical. Of course people will have to live with shadow. It's the only way to increase density (unless you want people to live in basements).

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#45

Post by tormeh »

Thlom wrote: post #32
woodpanel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not entirely true. If you walk the inner-city neighbourhoods, you will rarely encounter buildings with more than 10 stories [1]. Clearly there are options, which aren't on the table because of preservationism and zoning. [1] https://www.google.de/maps/@48.8575448,2.2997841,3a,75y,329....

But taller buildings equals wider streets to such a degree that the density you win by building high mostly gets eaten up by the lost real estate used for wider streets.

Why do you need wider streets? Moving people is what the metro is for.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#46

Post by woodpanel »

realusername wrote: post #42
woodpanel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it anecdotal or is it provable? There are dozens of open wide Rues, Avenues and Boulevards in Paris that don't have any dense housing compared to Manhattan or Hong Kong etc.

Yeah you can maybe put only 5 or 10 more skyscrapers by destroying the biggest empty spaces (there's not that many of them), what would be the point of that? It's not a dozen of skyscrapers which will solve the housing crisis.

No you would scrap some buildings instead. But thats of course not doable because preservationism declares every of those 6-8 story buildings in Paris, that are of crumbling conditions a historical landmark if necessary.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#47

Post by etiennemarcel »

forgotmypwagain wrote: post #43
s3m4j wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived there my whole life (26 years), have you walked ? Paris (stricto sensu) is small. You can walk the longest distance east-west in an afternoon, and buildings do change. Like comparing the 20th district with the 15th, have you not seen buildings change ? Montmartre and Montsouris ? There's not 2 hours of walking between these places. For the best contrast start at Nation and taking either the subway line 2…

Not sure why this is voted down as Paris intramuros is quite walkable as you said. With a velib (Paris municipal rental bike) you can probably go from South to North in 30-40 minutes. As you say there is quite a lot of architectural diversity already (I e.g. loved strolling through the Quartier Latin and discovering small side streets and different architectural patterns in buildings and neighborhoods), they just had…

Actually, the whole point of the new subway lines (especially line 15, which will go around the city through close suburbs) is densification. City planners want to avoid the city going further and further in the countryside and want to have denser hubs (around new stations) closer to the city.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#48

Post by cdoersch »

Wow--didn't expect my old paper to re-surface in 2018.

Besides being a neat visualization, one remarkable thing (to me) is that this is one of the few computer vision tasks where the state-of-the-art is still the old hand-designed descriptors--specifically HOG. The attempts to re-do this work with deep learning haven't worked so well. The closest I know is https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06343 , which I've never even seen applied to cities. The problem is actually that deep nets have too much invariance: they can classify whether a facade is in Paris or not, but there's no easy way to separate out different kinds of facades.

If anyone has questions about this work, post below and I'll try to answer.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#49

Post by HAL9000Ti »

nailer wrote: post #29

I'm not sure Paris does look like Paris. It's quite famous for being a let down: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

"From the estimated six million yearly visitors, [...]around 20 Japanese tourists a year are affected by the syndrome"

With 0.0003% of people being affected, I'd argue that this so called "symptom" is hardly a noteworthy phenomenon.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#50

Post by CaptainZapp »

s3m4j wrote: post #41
keiferski wrote: post #9

Anecdotally, after having lived in Paris for ~6 months, one of the most noticeable aspects of the city is its relative uniformity. Unlike Berlin, London, or Prague, you can wander for awhile in Paris and essentially see the same style of architecture and urban landscape repeated. It has something of an “endless” effect on your time perception.

Having lived there my whole life (26 years), have you walked ? Paris (stricto sensu) is small. You can walk the longest distance east-west in an afternoon, and buildings do change. Like comparing the 20th district with the 15th, have you not seen buildings change ? Montmartre and Montsouris ? There's not 2 hours of walking between these places. For the best contrast start at Nation and taking either the subway line 2…

I'm quite particular to the 19th district, with it's canal and the Parc de la Villette, which is certainly not drowned by tourists.

It's not a "nice" area in that sense, but it's rather enchanting to walk around, have a drink, or a bottle of wine on one of the bar boats and is growing in cultural experiences to be had.

Granted, I'd probably never have found it on my own if a virtually life long friend wouldn't be living in the area.

Coincidentally I'm off to Paris for the weekend come tomorrow evening and looking very much forward to it. :)

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