In a stimulating essay, Franck Lirzin, a former adviser to Emmanuel Macron at Bercy, pleads for measures that would allow the capital to avoid the worst in the face of rising temperatures.
Book. They are world-famous and are one of the signs that Paris can be recognized at a glance. The zinc roofs of the capital, however, are in the hot seat. Charming “lying on their backs, their little paws in the air”, as Raymond Queneau wrote, they represent an aberration in the age of climate change. “They do not insulate anything, and transform the attic into a sauna”, notes Franck Lirzin, in Paris facing climate change. In anticipation of the increasingly frequent tropical nights, we must give up registering these roofs as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and, on the contrary, remove them, isolate them from the inside, cover them with a reflective white coating.“Or outright, if the framework allows it, let’s transform them into tiled roofs like in Marseilles. »
Ocher Paris, covered with tiles? The upheaval in the climate will impose on the capital much stronger, and sometimes painful, challenges. This is what this short and stimulating essay shows. Franck Lirzin, its author, is a sort of repentant. Former adviser to Emmanuel Macron at Bercy, this polytechnic managed for five years a subsidiary of the real estate group Gecina, owner of 10,000 housing units in Paris. Upon arrival, a very violent storm floods several of these residences and blocks the elevators, sometimes for weeks. Two years later, a heat wave transforms other dwellings into a furnace. The company was hardly prepared.
The urgency to anticipate
“I understood later that these two episodes were manifestations of climate change,” says Franck Lirzin. And that it was becoming urgent to anticipate and adapt to the city. In particular in Paris, where heat waves and early heat waves are beginning to multiply, while the torrential rains are likely to intensify.
The book opens and closes with two visions of the same day in July 2050. First, it is a disaster. Crushed by a heat wave that drags on, Parisians are suffering. The prefecture prohibits the heart of Paris from passers-by and tourists, buildings are evacuated and their inhabitants are relocated to “cooling centers” in the distant suburbs, and remote work becomes compulsory. In the second fiction, the same heat wave produces less dramatic effects, because measures have ended up being taken. Trees have been planted to provide shade, cars are banned in the center, countless canals run through the city, and zinc roofs have disappeared.