The eleventh arrondissement of Paris is the densest in the city, the second-densest residential district in Europe, and one of the few places in central Paris where, on a hot July afternoon, you can walk along a pavement that smells faintly of new lime trees. The lime trees are recent. So is the apricot, the linden, the juvenile oak in the small triangle at Place Léon Blum that until 2022 was a bus turnaround. The eleventh has been planting at a pace that no other Parisian district has matched, and it has been doing so on a permit framework that is genuinely municipal rather than top-down imposed.
The legal instrument is the Permis de végétaliser, the Plant Permit, which the City of Paris introduced in 2015. Any resident can apply, free of charge, for the right to plant in a small section of public space outside their building: a tree pit, a wall-base strip, a planter on a pavement corner. The Mairie reviews the application against a small checklist, and if approved, the resident plants and maintains the green space for three years. After three years, the planting transfers to the city’s garden service. The permit has been renewed and extended in every Conseil de Paris since.
Why the eleventh moved fastest
François Vauglin, the Socialist mayor of the eleventh arrondissement since 2014, has staked an unusual share of his political capital on green infrastructure. The Mairie du 11e maintains a public dashboard tracking every approved plant permit, every block of grey-to-green conversion, and every removed parking space replaced by a tree pit. By the 2024 audit the eleventh had converted approximately one thousand four hundred parking spaces into permanent green space across a decade. The most-cited single intervention is the Boulevard Voltaire reorganisation: the median strip, formerly a contested traffic-management feature, now carries a continuous tree planting that the local Conseil de Quartier committees voted into being.
The arrondissement’s planting follows the wider Paris Plan Arbre, the city’s tree plan that committed to one hundred and seventy thousand new trees city-wide between 2020 and 2026. By the 2024 mid-term audit, approximately ninety-three thousand had been planted, the eleventh contributing somewhat above its proportional share. The plan’s most photographed pieces are the four forêts urbaines, the dense urban forests at Hôtel de Ville parvis, the front of Gare de Lyon, Place de Catalogne, and Place Igor Stravinsky, all completed between 2022 and 2024. None of those four sit in the eleventh, but the eleventh contributed more than two hundred mature street trees in the same period.
What the residents do, and what the city does
The work is split into two unequal halves. The mature street-tree planting, the species selection, the soil preparation and the irrigation infrastructure, is done by the city’s Direction des Espaces Verts et de l’Environnement, the parks and environment department, which has approximately one thousand seven hundred employees and a per-capita arboriculture budget that is the envy of every comparable European city. The volunteer work, which is what the residents experience, is the smaller fraction by tonnage and the larger fraction by political weight: the planters at corners, the grass strips at the foot of buildings, the small fruit trees in school courtyards. The residents see what they planted. They do not see the budget that made the rest possible.
The species selection has been deliberately diverse. Paris’s arboriculturists have been moving away from the over-planted London plane and the lime, toward a roster that includes cypress, persimmon, almond, and a handful of climate-adapted species that the city’s nursery programme has been raising in the regional pépinières. The diversification is partly aesthetic, mostly defensive: a single-species street is one pathogen away from a defoliation event, as the city’s chestnuts learned in the 2010s.
What other cities have started to copy
Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg all have versions of the Permis de végétaliser, copied with varying fidelity. Vienna’s parallel programme, the Begrünungsförderung, is older and more procedurally formal. Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon have similar municipal permits but lower per-capita uptake. The eleventh arrondissement’s rate of approved permits per resident, by the 2024 audit, was approximately three times the European urban median.
What the eleventh got right is the political simplicity of the instrument. The Permit is not a planning permission. It is not a subsidy. It is a delegation of a small, contained piece of public maintenance back to the residents who walk past it every day. The Mairie keeps a list of approved permit-holders, sends them a reminder when their three years are up, and then quietly absorbs the planting into the public realm. The compounding effect, ten years on, is a district that smells different in summer.
Sources: Mairie du 11e public planting dashboard, Plan Arbre Paris 2020-2026 documentation, Direction des Espaces Verts et de l’Environnement annual reports, Permis de végétaliser application records, Conseil de Quartier session minutes 2014-2024.