Mashadipati: A city of love, but not for cars

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The mayor who said no to cars

With Paris' mayoral election on Sunday, outgoing Mayor Anne Hidalgo is leaving behind a very different city than the one she stepped into as leader in 2014. Paris has since become greener, quieter and cleaner after a spate of policies aimed at making the city more walkable and bikeable — and less welcoming to polluting vehicles.

To show how Greater Paris has transformed over the last decade, reporters Marie Patino, Feargus O'Sullivan and Tom Février take us on a scenic journey from the city center to one of the region's newest suburban developments. Along the way, we pass through places like the historic La Bastille square and the riverside banks of the Seine, both of which were once choked with gas-guzzling traffic but have now opened up to crowds of pedestrians and cyclists to linger or ride around new greenery and a much cleaner waterway.

The journey also takes us to Porte de Clichy, where construction will pave the way for a major public transit expansion with 68 new transit stations. When complete, some 120 miles of new tracks will be laid out connecting outer suburbs to both the city center and to one another — part of the Paris region's grand plan to reduce private car use.

Such dramatic shifts have earned Hidalgo international acclaim as a promoter of green urban change. At home, these changes have been more controversial, with pushback particularly from suburbanites. Where her legacy goes from here may depend on who steps into her shoes.

See the graphics

More on CityLab

Mud Island shakes off the dust
There are signs of new life at the forgotten Brutalist entertainment complex in downtown Memphis. In 1982, the city spent $60 million to transform it into a 50-acre riverfront park that once drew more than a million visitors each year to its amphitheater, river museum and monorail. Today its attractions are shuttered, but a new tenant is moving in.

A change of heart for London's "ugliest" building
Once the target of Londoners' supposed disdain for Brutalism, the Southbank Centre has become one of the city's most popular hangout spots — and a protected one — thanks not so much to the building itself but to the revamped space around it. It all started with skateboarders.

Seoul gears up for an ARMY swarm
With the deadly 2022 Halloween stampede a not-too-distant memory for many in Seoul, officials are ramping up crowd control measures for the return of BTS, the world's most popular boy band. As many as 260,000 K-pop fans will descend onto the city's downtown plaza this weekend for the band's free concert.

The future is clogged
Sure there's only a handful of them now, but the more popular robotaxis become, the more likely they'll crowd urban streets and trigger traffic jams that even governments can't untangle, contributor David Zipper warns.

A boost for transit from NY's toll

1.28 billion

The number of rides taken on the New York City subway in 2025. That's a 7.7% jump in ridership from the previous year, suggesting NYC's congestion pricing toll prompted some drivers to use transit instead.

Building for humans or robots?

Artificial intelligence companies have been hiring, and they need offices for their human employees. That's been good news for post-pandemic New York City, where the industry has not only helped spur a rebound in the office leasing market but also helped lead it to its best year since 2014. AI firms added about 1 million square feet of office space in Manhattan alone in 2025, while legacy tech companies investing in their own AI products added some 2.1 million square feet across the city.

Meanwhile, the insatiable need for AI processing power has triggered a building spree of new workspaces — for computers, that is: Spending on data center development has exploded in the US, surpassing spending for new offices for humans for the first time at the end of last year. That's a boon for the construction industry, with some firms seeing a steady stream of data center projects lined up for years (to the detriment of communities fighting to not live near one).

Some see these as good signs for the economy; others are wary. The AI boom feels precarious, write Natalie Wong and Edison Wu, riding on the success of companies making tools that could ultimately supplant a lot of office workers. And the shift to data center dominance in the construction sector "may perpetuate itself even further," one expert tells Wu, if AI is used to "automate day-to-day jobs."

What we're taking in

The crypto company RealT bought up hundreds of rental homes across Detroit, and sold fractions of property ownership in the form of digital tokens. The model is now crumbling, leaving tenants in blighted homes and investors without their payout. (Outlier Media)

In light of sex abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez, cities across the US are scrambling to scrub the late labor leader's name from streets, schools and parks, and figuring out what to do with the murals and monuments honoring him. (NBC News)

A top "justice facility" architecture firm that billed its mission as making prisons more humane faced a revolt from its own employees after they learned of a contract to design one of Trump's immigration detention centers. (Mother Jones)

A design flaw involving the use of giant boulders may have been the culprit behind the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River in Washington, DC — one of the worst in US history. Officials are now sifting through old blueprints of the 54-mile-long pipeline in a race to patch up other potentially vulnerable areas. (Atlantic)

A scented ad campaign for ice cream did not pass the sniff test when commuters began complaining of an overpowering and "sickly" sweet smell inside the London Underground. (New York Times)

One last read

Weekend Edition

The Best Guide to the AI Revolution May Be Victorian Fiction

Novels set during the Industrial Revolution can illuminate what it's like to live through epochal change.

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A city of love, but not for cars