A recent FEPE newsletter included the interesting news that:

“Large, imposing advertising billboards are to be banned from the centre of Paris under a new plan by the city council to cut the size of ad hoardings by a third in the next two years.”

In addition to the reduction in allowable size of billboards, hoardings will have to “be at least 25m apart, increasing to 60m on the périphérique ring road, and no ads are permitted within 50m of a school.”

The announcement is also using this opportunity to include an innovative way to hide building sites and simultaneously fund public art as “temporary advertisements, up to 16m², would be allowed on the side of buildings being renovated, provided the advertiser also pays for an artist to decorate the rest of the scaffold.”

For the Parisian public there are some seemingly obvious positive outcomes: a decline in the number of signs (multinational media companies like JCDecaux, Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor will have to remove roughly 1400 over-sized signs), a reduction in the average size of signs and signage density, and hopefully some more public art.

While other European cities might be tempted to follow the Paris example, it’s important for cities to work with what is appropriate for them. For example outdoor media might be more appropriate in industrialised modern cities or industrial land use areas than in historic cities with a recognisable architectural heritage. More importantly cities should take informed decisions as to how they wish to manage signage and what they hope to achieve through this. An outright ban on outdoor media will prevent a city from generating any revenue from this asset that can be used to finance public utility, art or service.

The financing of public utility, e.g. public transport infrastructure, through outdoor advertising is a cornerstone of a company like JCDecaux but is also valuable to a city that cannot afford to pay hundreds of millions of Euros to develop the infrastructure needed to service a city’s transport needs.

Paris seems to be taking a cautious and hopefully informed approach, and should be commended for that.