Devido à profunda crise nos Restaurantes e cafés,
exepcionalmente foram oferecidas pelas cidades Europeias, possibilidades de expansão
TEMPORÁRIA de esplanadas no espaço público.
É imperativo que os empresários se consciencializem do
caráter exepcional e temporário destas medidas. Seria um pesadelo se após o
Verão de CRISE CORONA, estes empresários da hotelaria se convencessem que este
seria um direito adquirido, agravando a qualidade de vivência da Via Pública
com mais ocupação, mais lixo, mais ruído e menos espaço e direito ao descanso
nocturno dos habitantes.
Aqui, uma reportagem do conceituado Volkskrant em Paris.
OVOODOCORVO
REPORTAGE
TERRASSENOORLOG
IN PARIJS
The battle for Public Space / The (cafe) terrace War
Parisian pub bosses won't let their 'temporary' terraces
take away
In the densely
populated 11th arrondisement there is
little greenery to be found. Every additional square meter of terrace is
welcome. That is, café-goers are happy with it, local residents are delighted. Image Aurélie Geurts
In Paris, there
is a real terrace battle going on. Cafes may use the public space to set up a
terrace. Despite the corona restrictions, they can still make some money. Local
residents see their peace disturbed. 'Florists and bookstores are also
struggling. Surely they don't get extra space for free?'
Daan Kool31 July
2020, 15:13
'Yes, you have to
pay attention here,' says bartender Sabrina Fresnée with a smile after crossing the street with a
full tray. While serving large glasses of lemonade to two guests on the
terrace, a line bus roars by barely a metre away. Only when a whole procession
of cars, taxis and motorbikes has passed can
Fresnée return to the bar with
its empty tray.
The rue Jean-Pierre
Timbaud is a real nightlife street. Just like in the nearby rue
Oberkampf – known and notorious for the pub crawls – you can go for a
night of old-fashioned sagging. A
quartier de nuit, it is here
according to the local café owners: a night neighborhood. In pubs with names
like Pili Pili,
l'Homme Bleu and Alimentation
Générale, the beer is cheap and the nostalgic rock, french or not,
reverberates through the speakers. The happy
hour usually lasts about three
hours.
But terraces, no,
there weren't. There was simply no room for this: the street is a common
thoroughfare and the pavements are too narrow. 'There's 24 cafes here. Not one
of them was eligible for a terrace permit', says Sylvain Schoner, manager of
café L'Engrenage.
For those who are
now walking down the street on a Friday night, this is almost impossible to
imagine. What was a strip of parking spaces a few months ago has been
transformed into an elongated succession of terraces. Tables and chairs have
been placed on every apparently unused square metre. With umbrellas, wooden
bulkheads, artificial grass and flower pots, the café bosses have delineated
their makeshift terraces. Every bar in the street now has a terrace.
Public space
The café bosses
are using a scheme devised at Paris City Hall during the three long months of
spring in which the 18,000 capital bars, cafes and restaurants had to remain
closed. Since its reopening on 15 June, catering operators have been allowed to
set up tables and chairs in the public space. Free of charge and without the
intervention of the municipality. "Without that terrace, I don't know if
the keys to my business would still be in my pocket," says Schoner.
The temporary
terraces are intended as a helping hand in difficult times and also make it
easier to ensure sufficient distance between the tables. Big question is how
temporary they are. They may remain until 30 September at least, but Mayor Anne
Hidalgo has already hinted that that deadline will be extended as far as she is
concerned, if the city council agrees.
That would be 'a
real disaster', says Gilles Pourbaix, president of Vivre
Paris, an umbrella organisation of neighbourhood associations that
'defend the public space' and fight for 'the right to sleep'. Pourbaix has received dozens of complaints in recent
weeks from people who, to their surprise, discovered that a terrace had
suddenly appeared just below their apartment, with all the noise that entailed.
"Hidalgo has ignored the most important group of people, the local
residents, ray." If the terraces are still there after September, Vivre Paris will file a lawsuit against the
municipality.
Ten Commandments
"Look, these
are the Ten Commandments," says café owner Laurent Ribeiro as he points to
a poster on the window of his pub, which has the rules on which the new
terraces must comply. Tables are allowed on the pavement, but not if they block
the passage way for pedestrians or wheelchairs. Parking spaces may be claimed,
but disabled spaces and charging points for electric cars are not.
The hottest
hanging iron: by ten o'clock in the evening, the temporary terraces must be
cleared. "What kind of time is that?" the pub owner sneers. 'Then
it's still light!' However, he adheres to it nicely – because there are regular
complaints in the street, the municipality frequently checks. 'A few blocks
away, the café owners leave their terraces quietly until after midnight.'
But Ribeiro, who
has run the small dark pub Nun's Café for twenty years, is confident that the
opening hours for his new terrace will be extended and that the temporary
terraces will become permanent, or at least be built every spring. 'Those are
the next stages, we're going to win them.' 'We', those are the pub bosses from
the neighborhood, men of the type rough bolster white pit who have close
contact with each other and defend their interests by fire and sword through
the local business association.
The first stage
has already been successfully completed. In the beginning, inspectors from the
municipality forced the café owners to bring in their entire terrace every
evening. 'If there was a van or a car the next morning, we couldn't set
tables,' says Schoner. A shrewd lawyer, called in by the pub bosses, offered a
solution. The rules state that the entrepreneurs have to bring in their patio
furniture every night. In other words: anything that does not belong to the
furniture may remain.
In the meantime,
a creative race has developed between the cafés. The operators have worked
diligently on the demarcation of their terraces, formerly parking spaces. Each
pub marks its area extension in its own distinctive style. With bamboo
branches, pots with violets or hydrangeas, cheerfully painted wooden pallets or
an ivy-clad occasional pergola. The mayor of this district, the 11th
arrondissement, even called a competition for the most beautiful temporary
terrace.
Densely populated
In Paris, where
many inhabitants have to make do without a garden and balcony, a large part of
the city life takes place on the terraces in good weather. You can see people
sitting there for hours on their own with a book and a cup of coffee. 'It's not
Berlin here, there's not much space here and little greenery,' says Talel Teber, the owner of the Petit Clou Bar. 'The
11th is the most populous arrondissement of the city. If you want to sit
outside for a while, you'll soon be on a terrace.'
For the
café-goers in the quartier de nuit,
especially twenty-twenty-nurs and thirty-fives, the terrace revolution is
ideal. 'In the past, the tables on most terraces were very tightly crammed
together,' says student Benjamin
Leseigneur, who sits with three friends for a beer. 'If the municipality
is going to ban this, I think there will be a counter-movement. Now that we're
used to this, let's not just take this away from us anymore.'
Gilles
Pourbaix is less charmed. 'Surely you
can't have guests with good decency between chipboard bulkheads and parked
cars? It's not a face. Fortunately, there are very few tourists this summer.'
Hidalgo has appropriated the right to give away the public space to the café
owners for free, according to the president of
Vivre Paris. 'Of course the
hospitality industry is struggling. But so are the florists and the bookstores.
Surely they don't get extra space for free?'
"If my
neighbors complained, I'd sit down with them," Teber says, collapsing a terrace table, a few
minutes before 10 a.m. But according to the café owner, almost all the
complaints come from a handful of people who live hundreds of meters away.
'Wealthy retirees who don't accept that it's a lively neighborhood here and who
have seas of time to complain. Even at the district office, it's killing them.'
Pourbaix sees it
diametrically differently. 'Le lobby of bars has won, with in their wake the
alcohol lobby. Make no mistake, I see for myself at town hall meetings how
thick the catering entrepreneurs and the aldermen are with each other. In
streets like rue Jean-Pierre
Timbaud, the pub bosses are in charge.'
'Messieus-ladies,
you really have to go now, otherwise I get fined', says Teber at five past ten in a last attempt to
get the last guests off the terrace in a friendly manner. With slightly swaying
legs, the company gets up, talking loudly, on the way to a terrace that is
still open.
TERRASVERWARMING
The desire to
allow the extra terraces permanently seems difficult to reconcile with the ban
on patio heating announced by the French government this week. After the coming
winter, terrace heating will be banned throughout France. That was one of the
recommendations of the Citizens' Council for climate that President Macron created in 2019. In some cities, including
Rennes, terrace heating is already prohibited. This is not yet the case in
Paris: it is estimated that there are as many as 12,500 establishments in the
capital that heat their terraces.
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