The honest mayor
The core message of the session was that making a city more livable requires political resilience, a people-first use of public space, and the discipline to connect difficult urban changes to urgent shared goals such as health, climate, civic pride, and economic recovery. Anne Hidalgo, former mayor of Paris and global ambassador for the Global Covenant of Mayors, described how her long tenure in Paris City Hall shaped her view that cities must be built “for the people, with the people.” The moderator framed her leadership through Paris’s major transformation: removing traffic from 100 streets, converting the Seine riverbanks from a busy highway into green spaces, parks, play areas, and cafés, adding more than 1,500 kilometers of cycling tracks, and improving air quality while facing strong local resistance. Hidalgo also reflected on leading through the 2015 terrorist attacks, the Notre Dame fire, the Olympics, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
urban-planningcity-leadershipparis+1 other speaker
