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The vast majority of the buildings in La Défense Click here, Paris’ skyscraper district on the Seine to the west of the city centre, are privately owned and house some 1500 companies, including the head offices of more than a dozen of France’s top corporations. Unfortunately, most of the skyscrapers here are impersonal and forgettable ‘lipstick tubes’ and ‘upended shoeboxes’, with a few notable exceptions including the Cœur Défense (Défense Heart; 2001), the Tour EDF (2001) and the Tour T1 (2005). But outranking them all in size, beauty and sustainability will be Tour Phare (Lighthouse Tower), a 299m-tall office and retail tower that torques like a human torso and, through awnings that raise and lower when the sun hits them, uses light as a building material. It will be completed in 2012.

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ENVIRONMENT & PLANNING

THE LAND

The city of Paris – the capital of both France and the historic Île de France region – covers an area of just under 87 sq km (or 105 sq km if you include the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes). Within central Paris – which Parisians call intra-muros (Latin for ‘within the walls’) – the Right Bank is north of the Seine, while the Left Bank is south of the river.

Paris is a relatively easy city to negotiate. The ring road, known as the Périphérique, makes an irregularly shaped oval containing the entire central area. The Seine cuts an arc across the oval, and the terrain is so flat that the 126m-high Butte de Montmartre (Montmartre Hill) to the north is clearly visible for some distance.

Paris is divided neatly into two by the Seine and also into 20 arrondissements, which spiral clockwise from the centre in a logical progression. City addresses always include the number of the arrondissement, as streets with the same name exist in different districts. In this book, arrondissement numbers are given after the street address using the notation generally used by the French: 1er for premier (1st), 2e for deuxième (2nd), 3e for troisième (3rd) and so on. On some signs or commercial maps, you will see the variations 2ème, 3ème etc and sometimes IIe, IIIe etc.

There is almost always a metro station within 500m of wherever you are in Paris so all offices, museums, hotels, restaurants and so on included in this book have the nearest metro or RER (a network of suburban lines) station given immediately after the contact details. Metro stations generally have a plan du quartier (map of the neighbourhood) on the wall near the exit(s).

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GREEN PARIS

For a densely populated urban centre inhabited for more than two millennia, Paris is a surprisingly healthy and clean city. Thanks mainly to Baron Haussmann, who radically reshaped the city in the second half of the 19th century, a small army of street sweepers brush litter into the gutters from where it is hosed into sewers, and a city ordinance requires residents to have the façades of their buildings cleaned every 10 years.

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top picks

PARKS & GARDENS

Parc de La Villette

Jardin du Luxembourg

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Parc Floral de Paris

Bois de Boulogne

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These days, despite the city’s excellent (and cheap) public transport system, Haussmann’s wide boulevards are usually choked with traffic, and air pollution is undoubtedly the city’s major environmental hazard. But things have improved tremendously on that score: the city leadership, which came to power in coalition with the Green Party, first restricted traffic on some roads at certain times and created lanes only for buses, taxis and bicycles. Then, in 2007, in an unprecedented move for a city its size, Paris launched the Vélib’ communal bicycle rental programme Click here with more than 20,500 bicycles available at more than 450 stations. The City of Light (and life for foot-sore Lonely Planet authors) will never be the same.

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GROWING UP IN PARIS

The architectural feature du jour (currently) in Paris is the vertical garden – called a mur végétal (vegetation wall) in French – especially