Toulouse: these five major parks that must bring nature back to the city
The Pink City wants to be greener and greener to meet climate challenges and fight against pollution. Five parks will prosper within the metropolis.
It is no longer the city that goes to the countryside, as Alphonse Allais dreamed, it is the countryside that comes to the city. In line with the Toulouse urban project “Pink City – Green City”, five large parks are being developed on the territory of the metropolis. “Five mosaic natural arteries that intimately irrigate the city over a total length of 62 km”, as the magazine of urban planning agencies writes “Traits d’agence” in its latest issue. Like the large Garonne park, implemented since 2015, the large parks of the Canal du Midi, Touch, Hers and Margelle de Garonne are now recognized as being of municipal and inter-municipal interest. The idea is to create green axes offering continuous routes that meet the challenges of biodiversity and climate adaptation. The challenge is sizeable to make these spaces suitable for walks and commuting between home and work. This requires the development of the districts crossed in a close interconnection between the urban environments and the natural environments. A “reciprocal optimization” explains the town planners associated with the various projects. “These large Toulouse parks are not to be considered as finished objects, but as urban and ecological systems, living, brought to adapt to changes in lifestyles and the making of the city”, they warn .
Five natural arteries 62 km long in total
This reconquest of plants is part of the Life project. Cities like Toulouse must take care of their green spaces, while current climate models predict an average local increase of 4°C by the end of the century in the Pink City. The challenge of the Life project is to lower the temperature by 3°C locally and cool our overheated atmosphere. The island of Ramier in the large Garonne park, which should become the “green lung” of the Toulouse conurbation by 2025, serves as a laboratory for this revegetation. After the destruction of the Parc des Expositions, work benefited the biological revitalization of the soil. A mixture of plants, called “green manures”, was thus sown in close mesh, to promote the fertilization of the soil, the capture and the restitution of nitrogen and nitrates. This must contribute to the structuring of the soil. These “ambassador” plants are legumes (clovers, etc.), grasses (oats, fescue, etc.), and other buckwheat, phacelia, wild carrots, alfalfa, meadow pea. Flowers that now grow instead of concrete. Admittedly, the soil restoration process is a bit long before any planting operation, but this innovative and exemplary initiative in terms of biological revitalization is adapted to the local ecosystem. Within a few years, the network of five major parks in the Toulouse metropolis will allow city dwellers to cross the city without leaving “the countryside”. A beautiful prospect.