Denis Baupin
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Denis Baupin is a French political figure, born in Cherbourg (Manche) on 2 June 1962. He is presently Deputy Mayor of the City of Paris, where as an elected member of the city council he represents France’s Green Party.
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[edit] Background
In 1984 Baupin graduated with an engineering degree from Paris’s prestigious École Centrale de Paris, subsequently became director of the international NGO « Terre des hommes » ("Planet of mankind").
A member of the Green Party since 1989, he served as council to the then-leader of the French Greens de Dominique Voynet in the European Parliament, and in 1997 as special adviser to the French Ministry of Territorial Management (“Ministère de l'Aménagement du territoire”. Since 1995 he has been an elected official of the 20th arrondissement of Paris.
Baupin has been a strong supporter of cooperation between the Greens and the French Socialist Party.
On March 2007 he was designated by the Green Party to lead the campaign for the 2008 municipal elections.
[edit] Accomplishments
One of the initiatives that his team has put in place has been the Vélib’, Paris’s “free bike” project that entered services on 15 July 2007 with the first ten thousand cycles and some 700 stations already in service for the opening. The program is aiming to have 20,000 cycles and 1451 stations on Paris’s street by the end of 2007. The city has also considerably expanded its network of protected cycling lanes, to 371 as of the opening of the Vélib’ project.
He firmly believes that a densely settled city like Paris is not very well served by the kind of “all car” approach that has shaped so many world cities over the least decades. His reasoning behind this has been set out in his April 2007 book [[“'Tout voiture, no future]], ("All cars, no future").
One “transport” project that has been developed under his joint leadership with Paris’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë has been the Paris Plage (Paris Beach project in which a 3.5 km. stretch of a major urban highway right in the center of the city that runs along the Seine is taken out of service for one summer month each year and converted to make it a “beach” and otherwise open public space, where cars are not allowed but walking, cycling, and a wide range of games and public space events are organized day and night.
The public document that sets out the key underpinnings of the city strategy under Baupin is its [Plan de Déplacements Parisien (PDP)]
[edit] Publications
- Tout voiture, no future, ("All cars, no future"), L'Archipel, 2007. - ISBN 978-2-84187-920-5
