This is part of a NiCHE series that investigates if rivers can be heritage, and if so, what kind of heritage. A companion to our series on Canadian Heritage Rivers, authors focus on the epistemological, historical, and cultural place of rivers with lessons and parallels for Canada, including comparative stories and/or lessons.
The Seine River flows 775 kilometres across northern France, from its source in Burgundy through Paris to the English Channel at Le Havre, draining a basin roughly the size of Ireland. The Seine River, as seen today, apart from some forested streams, has been largely modified and artificialized, and is a result of human reshaping over centuries. So too are the “by-products” of this process. Take, for example, the World Heritage site of Paris, Banks of the Seine, where the channelling of the river and the construction of its quays, which have effectively confined the natural river, are designated together with the city’s architectural achievements as a single exceptional ensemble. Or, the Seine Estuary Nature Reserve, where the 1,000 hectares of reed beds — today natural biological filters and nesting grounds for migrating birds — that spread across the estuary as a result of sediment accumulation following engineering works from the late nineteenth century onwards.1 The latter was a part of basin-wide transformations that, especially since the 1830s, reshaped the Seine in three dimensions — depth, length, and width — and defined its primary function as an industrial and shipping axis. Set in motion, through the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, the works were largely driven by the spatial and economic growth of the capital, requiring more reliable navigation to meet the demand for resource supply.2 The water flow in the Seine’s channel has also been regulated since the construction of four storage reservoirs between 1949 and 1990 on the Seine and its tributaries, built in response to the catastrophic floods of 1910 and 1924 to control high waters and sustain summer levels within the city. Both designations raise a question: can a river be heritage, and if so, what kind — when it has been so thoroughly reshaped by human hands? This piece engages with this question through the lens of the city–river interface, a physical record of changing human–river dynamics — and a critical reflection in the context of urban and climate resilience.
A river of many meanings
The decisions which have physically transformed the Seine through time have reflected and reinforced particular ideas about what the river was for. The perception and valuing of the river have changed, from a sacred entity (Sequana) in pre– and Gallo–Roman times, to functional axis through the Middle Ages, a celebrated landscape that inspired the Impressionists in the second half of the nineteenth century, in contrast with and in the parallel with industrialisation, urban growth, and the concentration of navigation and wastewater in the river, which turned Seine, into a source of sickness — compounded in the mid-twentieth century by the construction of the thirteen-kilometre Voie Georges Pompidou expressway, which drew a barrier of noise, pollution, and traffic between the city and its river. This retreat from the waterfront has been common across other urban rivers, e.g., St. Lawrence in Montreal, which followed a similar timeline of industrial and infrastructure uses concentrated on the river’s edge, at the expense of public access.
River–city interface
This shifting relationship is captured particularly well through the evolution of the Parisian quays (Quais de la Seine). Their construction and modifications created a third space between the city and the river — an extension of both, where either takes over periodically, especially the river, during the winter and spring swells.
Conceptually descended from Hoyle’s global port–city interface, which was framed primarily around cycles of maritime technology and logistics, the river–city interface in Paris has been more strongly defined by planning and governance changes, though not without some influence from the operation of commercial freight ports in the city. The river–city interface is distinct from what the waterfront literature typically describes: it also encompasses the roads on the high bank which, while part of the city’s transportation network, occupy the ground that mediates between city and water — their design determining the ease with which the water can be reached.
This space is a product of at least four distinct governance moments: royal urbanism from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which established the first systematic stone embankments — though the earliest stone quays date to the fourteenth century, with construction continuing through the sixteenth; the Napoleonic and Haussmann-era consolidation of the nineteenth century, which created the two-level structure of high quay (quais hauts) and lower berge seen today; the mid-twentieth century motorway programme, which occupied the lower berge in favour of traffic circulation; and the pedestrianisation driven by air quality concerns from the mid-1990s onwards.
Reclaiming the river–city interface: Paris success story
In the 1940s, the Seine quays were widened, and in the 1960s, the Voie Express Rive Droite — later renamed Voie Georges Pompidou — thirteen kilometres of quayside, and a corresponding 2.5 kilometres Voie Express Rive Gauche were put into service. Effectively, both Voies became pollution and safety barriers to water access. The growing pollution led to closures twice throughout 1994 and to gradual, temporary pedestrianisation measures – the Paris Plages operation. In the 2010s, the Paris Council approved the permanent pedestrianisation of the section between the Quai des Tuileries and the Quai Henri-IV to redirect the traffic to decrease the air pollution accumulated in the city centre, with the last cars passing on the left bank in 2013, and 3.5km on the right bank in 2016. Opposition citing suburban congestion and pollution displacement was somewhat overstated — the expressway accounted for 0.16% of annual mileage in the Île-de-France region, and overall air quality improved, with a 25% drop along the quays. The following year, Rives de Seine Park was inaugurated with pedestrian and cycling paths, parks, and leisure spaces, and in 2025, the public space was extended into the water with three swimming spots.
What is even more interesting, and potentially relevant to other urban rivers, is that these interventions have renegotiated the uses. For the Bras Marie swimming spot to function, the navigation had to be rerouted during swimming hours (swimming had been banned since 1923 due to barge traffic). Such arrangements to divide river use by time between competing stakeholders have precedents stretching back centuries on French waterways.3 Similarly, Port Javel-Bas, following its 2024 renovation, introduced a spatial-sharing model that accommodates both port activities and public leisure on the same quay.
Together, these decisions have increased access to water and diversified the space with several interface typologies across the city, each defining what has and could further happen in these spaces.
Rivers are not heritage in a fixed or categorical sense. They are, however, sites where different values have been assigned through time, and where the resulting record of governance decisions is spatially legible. In that sense, they engage with the same concepts as most heritage designations, which encode a particular moment’s socio-cultural priorities. More importantly, understanding the pattern in which decision-making has historically made and remade urban rivers and their edges helps cities navigate future decisions in the context of growing needs for urban resilience under social and climate pressures.
Today, Quebec City faces similar questions. Through the City-Port Vision framework, planned for the upcoming ten years, it seeks to create publicly accessible waterfront interfaces while preserving port activity. Paris does not offer Quebec City a blueprint — but reading the physical record of the quais, where each shift in the river-city interface created permission to reframe what the river is for, might be the most useful thing heritage analysis can offer cities still in the middle of that negotiation.
Bibliography
AirParif. 2017. “Résultats de la première campagne de suivi de la fermeture des voies sur berges.”
ArchiSEINE. n.d. “Paris port-de-mer : le projet de l’ingénieur Bérigny.” https://archiseine.metis.upmc.fr/fr/node/199.
Beautemps-Beaupré, Charles-François. 1834. Carte de l’embouchure de la Seine d’après la reconnaissance hydrographique de 1834. Bibliothèque municipale du Havre, CP 845.
Breś, Justyna, and Karolina A. Krośnicka. 2021. “Evolution of Edges and Porosity of Urban Blue Spaces: A Case Study of Gdańsk.” Urban Planning 6 (3): 90–104. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i3.4108.
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Hein, Carola. 2016. “Port Cities and Urban Waterfronts: How Localized Planning Ignores Water as a Connector.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 3 (3): 419–38. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1141.
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https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-7185(89)90026-2.
Hoyle, Brian S. 2000. “Global and Local Change on the Port-City Waterfront.” Geographical Review 90 (3): 395–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2000.tb00344.x.
Lestel, Laurence, Michel Meybeck, Catherine Carré, and Jérôme Belliard. 2023. “The Seine, the River Dedicated to Paris.” In River Culture: Life as a Dance to the Rhythm of the Waters, edited by K. M. Wantzen, 673–97. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. https://doi.org/10.54677/CGDX8656.
Lestel, Laurence, David Eschbach, Michel Meybeck, and François Gob. 2020. “The Evolution of the Seine Basin Water Bodies Through Historical Maps.” In The Seine River Basin, edited by Nicolas Flipo, Pierre Labadie, and Laurence Lestel, 29–58. Handbook of Environmental Chemistry. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/698_2019_396.
Maison de l’Estuaire. n.d. “Une gestion diversifiée des roselières.”
PIREN-Seine. 2025. “Usages contrastés des cours d’eau: les cas de l’Aube.” Rapport d’activité 2025.
Tompson, Helen. 2016. “Paris divided: two-mile highway by Seine goes car-free for six months” The Guardian, September 9, 2016.
- Réserve Naturelle de l’Estuaire de la Seine ↩︎
- A French state corps of civil engineers, established in 1716, responsible for the planning and construction of roads, bridges, and waterways on behalf of the crown and later the state. ↩︎
- As early as 1665, and again in the 1720s, proposals were made on French waterways to divide river use by time and separated navigation from timber floating on the Seine and its tributaries to serve competing urban and regional demands. ↩︎
Zuzanna Sliwinska
Latest posts by Zuzanna Sliwinska (see all)
- River–City Interface: Layers of Planning Through Time - September 2, 2026