by FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN

Whatever you think of them, you can’t say the new promises from Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo lack ambition. Seeking re-election at the municipal polls in March, Hidalgo unveiled proposals this week that include a referendum on the role of Airbnb, a plan to make the city center “100 percent bicycle,” a new 5,000-strong municipal police force in which at least half the staff are women, and a vow to spend 20 billion euros on converting office buildings into affordable housing.

By international standards these are bold proposals. Other European cities may already be on the road to going further in similar policy areas: Madrid has already banned cars from its inner city, Barcelona has hit Airbnb with a fine of €600,000 for breaking local home-share rule infractions, and Berlin has approved a citywide five-year rent freeze. No other city is as yet going quite as hard as Paris, however, in trying to tackle pollution, congestion, and housing access and affordability simultaneously.

In an unusual Paris election season, however, what might seem ultra-progressive in other cities doesn’t set Hidalgo’s policy package drastically apart from the crowd. While she currently leads in the polls, her primary opponents have not necessarily been Green-skeptic conservatives as such, but other candidates occupying the center-left space who have equally forthright, broadly pro-green choices in their manifestos. As news magazine L’Obs puts it, Paris has “a municipal landscape where all the candidates are striving to green their program.” In that local context, Hidalgo’s plans do not seem especially radical. Read more via CityLab