Trees from Garden to City - Tracing the Urbanization of Street Trees in Paris from the 16th to the 19th Centuries -

In 2025, Paris launched an ambitious plan to plant 170,000 trees and green 500 streets under the name of ‘rues-jardin (garden streets).’ This initiative, designed to address climate adaptation and improve quality of life, also represents an attempt to reshape the urban form. Yet, a historical tracing of Parisian street trees reveals that the imagination of a “garden street” is far from new. From the outset, the city’s tree-lined streets originated in the formal structure of gardens. This study traces the transformation of the <italic>allée</italic>, a key compositional unit of the French formal garden, into a structural component of urban infrastructure from the late 16th to the late 19th century. From <italic>pallemalle</italic> and <italic>cours</italic> to boulevards and avenues, the garden <italic>allée</italic>, once designed for pedestrian strolling, gradually extended into carriage promenades, peripheral urban walks, and ultimately into infrastructures. In this process, the geometric principles of the formal garden-linearity, repetition, axiality, and ordered rows-were transplanted into the city through the very trees that came to define its streetscapes. The linear landscape formed by rows of trees planted at regular intervals along streets thus bears the imprint of a garden-derived spatial order. At a time when many cities around the world are striving to become “garden cities,” this study proposes a new urban imagination that views street trees not as mere infrastructure, but as companion species with whom we co-inhabit the city.