Toward these environmental goals, change is already underway. Upstream, just outside the Paris ring road, La Peripherique, stretches of the Bièvre in the suburbs of Arcueil and Gentilly, have recently been reopened, according to the Friends of the Bièvre. Furthermore, a section within Paris proper, near Parc Kellerman, where the Bièvre can still be seen forming a waterfall and a small pond before heading underground, has been chosen to be daylighted before Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s term is up for renewal in 2026.
Hervé Cardinal, the director of technical services at SIAVB, the governmental Bièvre Valley Intermunicipal Sanitation Authority, worked on the adjoining sections of the Bièvre and opened the riverbed with great success. “A stream in the middle of the concrete is not normal,” he says. By daylighting it, “we improve the quality of the water. We increase the protection against floods.”
But hidden rivers are not just a Parisian problem. Every city has them: concealed waterways that flow beneath the streets. They were once the reason people and communities settled in that exact spot, but now many of them are forgotten. In Sydney, there’s Tank Stream, initially the only source of freshwater for the first European settlers; and in London, River Fleet is still visible in places, though mostly out of sight. In New York, Minetta Creek or Minetta Brook still flows below Lower Manhattan, where many residents have problems with flooding in their basements. More often than not, a culverted river, of which there are a few on the island, is to blame. When left open, rivers and brooks absorb extra water in their natural flood plains; when encased, the water has nowhere to go but up, often into people’s cellars.
In recent years, however, with the ongoing threat of climate change and the environmental crises it brings with it, more and more initiatives have been started around the world to daylight hidden rivers again, to not only make city environs a greener place and offer welcoming habitats for local flora and fauna, but also to help deal with floods and global warming. Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon stream was one of the first major rivers to be daylighted in 2005; Sheffield in the United Kingdom now has a new park due to the surfaced Porter Brook; and ongoing works are freeing the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, New York.
Following an intensive study by the City of Paris’s environmental department of the riverbed and its surroundings, first steps have been taken to resurface the Bièvre, by uncovering sections of the river that can be opened without major upheaval for the residents and infrastructure, and further plans, as to logistics and construction, are incoming. “It is good to talk about all this, but to act is even better,” Cardinal says. “This is part of improving climate change on a larger scale.”
It won’t be long now that Parisians can walk again along the quays of their two rivers, and perhaps write songs, too, about the reborn Bièvre.
