Love is a waterfall

The 19^th district of Paris, where I’m currently living, is a bustling, chaotic, low-rent part of the city. Once a proletarian neighbourhood where newly-arrived country folk rented rooms while trying to find work as porters, dressmakers, or maids, it’s now a magnet for immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and as far away as China. The streets are grubby, the accommodation cramped and basic, there’s graffiti on the walls and garbage blowing in the wind; it’s a world away from the ultra-affluent quartiers around the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées which most tourists associate with “the city of light”.

Even so, it’s difficult for us today to imagine the squalor and misery of Eastern Paris 150 years ago: the barefoot children running and sleeping in the streets, whole families sharing one dingy room, lives framed and enclosed by a few dark, dirty and dangerous streets – unable to imagine or afford any form of recreation much beyond stupefying themselves with rotgut booze.

Much of Paris, even right in the centre, was similar when Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to reconceive and reconstruct Paris as a modern city worthy of its glorious name. An important part of Haussmann’s plan was to provide the working classes with access to fresh air and the beauty of nature – hence the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Built on the site of an abandoned quarry, the Parc is an extraordinary achievement of artificial landscaping, full of steep hills, mountain-like trails, hills and promontories, the highest of which is surmounted by a pagoda. There’s a large lake, where carp and tench swim and where herons and cormorants come to fish – and, most exotic of all, a 100-foot-high artificial waterfall, where clean, clear water flows over black rocks and into the lake. It’s as popular today as it must have been in the days of Baron Haussmann; small children chase each other up and down the hills, lovers embrace each other on shady benches, purposeful joggers plod around the tracks, and groups of friends spread picnic cloths on the grass and pass Sunday afternoons laughing and chatting over wine, cheese and pâté.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is immaculately maintained by the city council, the flower-beds regularly weeded, the collections of exotic trees and shrubs carefully labelled and nurtured, and the tracks and paths swept twice a day – and, a nice 21st-century touch, free wi-fi is available throughout the park for people who want to bring their novels in progress or their Facebook accounts into its green shade.

What stupendous acts of love such places are, and the glories of the world’s great cities. Not built as the private property of a king, an emperor or a nobleman, nor to enrich some greedy great corporation, but simply to enable the people, starved of green and of contact with the countryside to breathe clean air and to rise their eyes to the beauty and simplicity of nature – and their maintenance today is an ongoing act of love which we all too easily take for granted. It often seems today that whatever’s free is somehow diminished in value thereby; shopping malls mean a lot more to a lot of people than municipal parks, while the natural world is fragmented and atomized into suburban gardens and country clubs.

Yet in parks we city-dwellers not only touch the eternal splendour of the natural world without effort or travel, but we also do so at no cost, and together. They remind us of what we share, as citizens, as people, and as living creatures upon the Earth – living lessons in history, civics, and ecology.