'Dubai in Paris': French climate protesters fight plans for €3bn theme park

Tending her rows of courgettes, leeks and potatoes, Cécile Coquel, a telecoms worker and guerilla gardener, stood firm despite local authorities’ recent warning that everything must be ripped up and the field vacated.

A demonstration against EuropaCity in Gonesse, north of Paris.

“These are the vegetables of the resistance!” she proclaimed. “We’ll fight to save this land.”

The patchwork of highly fertile fields 15km (9 miles) from Notre Dame cathedral, as the crow flies, is the closest remaining farmland to northern Paris, nudging up against some of the most deprived towns on the French capital’s outskirts.

But it has become a political and environmental battlefield as the state and private investors prepare to concrete over around 280 hectares of it. They plan to create a business park and a vast €3bn (£2.6bn) theme park, leisure and tourism complex called EuropaCity.

Read the story from The Guardian by Angelique Chrisafis - “'Dubai in Paris': French climate protesters fight plans for €3bn theme park.”

Severe 'prune' for community garden

Mat Pember, director of Pop Up Patch, a
community garden
behind Federation Square faced with closure.

A thriving community garden at Federation Square used by CBD residents, chefs and students is facing closure, with square management calling for expressions of interest for the site.

Potatoes, strawberries, lemons, chillis, cabbages and rosemary flourish in 100 planter boxes at Pop Up Patch, a green oasis behind the square between Flinders Street skyscrapers and railway lines.

Mat Pember, whose the Little Vegie Patch Co runs the garden at a small profit – charging $25 a week per box – fears the four-year-old garden will be "cut down in its prime", in favour of a more lucrative helipad or car park.

Read Carolyn Webb’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Future of thriving CBD community garden under a cloud.”

(Yes, the last thing Melbourne needs is more parking spaces or even a “heliport”; rather, what it really needs is more community gardens such as this one at Federation Square that look likely to be sacrificed to profit – Robert McLean.)