I just returned from Paris with tired legs, achy feet, hundreds of photos, and a renewed appreciation for something that most cities lack: the enjoyment of walking. Paris is a city built for the pedestrian in a way few modern cities are. While other places require cars, busses, and rideshares to get around, Paris invites you to step outside and start walking. And once you do, you realize how perfectly designed the city is for exploring on foot. Why I visited Paris makes for an interesting anecdote.
As an amateur watercolor artist, I came across a delightful little travel guide filled with an array of beautiful and whimsical watercolor illustrations. The book, Paris in Stride, is a walking guide to Paris, co-authored by Jessie Kanelos Weiner, a talented Amercian artist who moved to Paris about twenty years ago. (She also co-authored New York in Stride.) From her book bio I discovered she holds a watercolor retreat twice a year in the historic artist district of Montparnasse. I checked out the curriculum, loved what I saw, applied and was accepted. I flew to Paris several days in advance to explore Paris using her guide and then attended what turned out to be a spectacular educational experience.
What I discovered through the book and my own experience, is that Paris’ scale and design make it an exceptional walking city. While it’s a big city—more than two million people – it feels much smaller. Distances between neighborhoods might look intimidating on a map, yet when you start walking them, you discover that each is only 10 or 20 minutes apart. The city seems to shrink as you explore it, walking from one attraction to another.
What began as a stroll from my hotel in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres area to the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, turned into an improvised wandering through angled streets lined with beautiful buildings and interesting shops. Each block brought a surprise – a wine bar, a beautiful paperie store, a hat store, a store selling cheese, another truffles, a boulangerie, or an outdoor cafe. The curiosity of what’s in the next block keeps pulling you forward. As you walk you don’t pass boring block-long office buildings, mega-stores, or huge supermarkets as you do elsewhere. Instead you pass scores of these specialty stores. Fortunately, you also pass little parklets where you can sit for a few minutes to rest your feet.
When Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris in the mid-1800s, he gave the city its defining look of gorgeous architecture – six and seven story buildings lined with balconies, complemented with new signage, lamposts, and wide sidewalks. The buildings were designed to highlight the endless array of small businesses. The ground level was used for small businesses and each floor above was specifically designed for offices and residences. As a result, everything at street level feels accessible everywhere you look, and there’s always something worth stopping to see along the route. Then there’s the constant flow of Parisians on the streets at all hours walking along with you. They walk to work, to school, to dinner, to the market.
Most great walking cities have one or two strong districts. Paris has dozens. The Latin Quarter with its bookstores and crooked streets. The Marais area with boutiques, delicatessens, and falafel restaurants. Each neighborhood has its own its own personality and its own set of surprises. You never have to walk far to feel like you’ve entered a completely new environment. On top of the this are a large number of the world’s finest museums where you can spend hours learning about the history of Paris, view paintings from the great artists, or explore the great mechanical inventions of the past.
Unlike cities where walking is something you endure to get somewhere, in Paris walking becomes the point itself. The act of moving through the city—lingering at a window display, detouring down a side street, grabbing a baguette and espresso makes the walk more enjoyable. You don’t realize how unique it is until you return home and find yourself back in a world of parking lots, crosswalks, and big-box stores.
In an era where tech companies are now chasing futuristic ideas—self-driving cars, hyperloops, underground tunnels—it’s refreshing to see that the most satisfying innovation remains the oldest one: a city designed for walking.
