Metro line cutting through course forcing sustainable innovation

Le Golf National

France

The project of the SGP (Grand Paris Society) is to create an ecological transport service around Paris. The metro line 18 will serve 10 stations between Versailles & Orly airports on 35km of rails for 110 000 targets a day. Unfortunately, the design of this line will get through our site and will reduce our surface by taking 10 hectares on the south part of the course.

This plan seems so damaging for our ecological balance that we really needed to establish an intelligent relationship with the actors of the SGP and with local stakeholders.

Therefore, we suggested we become a site to welcome rare species threatened by the Line 18 in downstream & upstream places. In that approach, we already implanted a stock of “Drave des Murailles” & we are working very hard to create a new zone in order to welcome the “Etoile d’Eau”.

This move may help us maintain a useful & positive relationship with the SGP institution. We benefit from a good posture in our exchanges and we got the unformal acceptance for restitution of our own natural resources during the construction site. For example, we may recover our wood by planting new trees & mulching the ones that need to be cut for the benefit of our vegetable gardens, paths, straw-mulched areas, etc. (big carbon footprint economy because everything will stay on the spot). Same for the earth transportation: we need merlons to hide the future metro and it will be possible to use it efficiently on site. We also are thinking about big landscape creations in order to increase the surface of available water and to be able to receive the “étoile d’eau” on these new wet zones. It will also be an opportunity to develop the aquatic fauna with the capability of a project of public interest.

Metro 18 through the Golf National will also be a subject for students in Master’s degree that will help us to list the natural resources threatened by the constructions. Last year was the first for the floristic & faunistic inventory by students of Paris/Saclay university and an ecologist’s office = Confluences.

We hope to reproduce this experience next years until the beginnings of the Metro 18 work areas.

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