Announcing: CityNeighborhoods Paris!

Dear CityNeighborhoods friends,

I am thrilled to announce the launch of CityNeighborhoods Paris, the first full international city atlas from the CityNeighborhoods project.

You can explore the new site here:

https://paris.cityneighborhoods.co

For years, CityNeighborhoods.NYC has been built around a simple but endlessly revealing idea: that a city becomes more meaningful when we slow down, walk it carefully, photograph it closely, and try to understand the neighborhoods that give it shape.

New York City was the origin of that work. It taught me how to look. It taught me how a neighborhood can be official and unofficial, mapped and remembered, historic and evolving, deeply local and constantly changing. It taught me that boundaries matter, but that they are guides, not verdicts.

CityNeighborhoods Paris carries that same spirit across the ocean.

But Paris required its own way of being read.

Most people encounter Paris through familiar names: Le Marais, Montmartre, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Latin Quarter. Others come to understand the city through its twenty arrondissements, those spiraling civic districts that structure so much of how Paris is mapped and imagined.

Both ways of seeing are useful. Neither is enough.

Paris is not only a city of arrondissements. It is not only a city of famous neighborhoods, monuments, museums, café streets, or cinematic atmosphere. It is a layered city — civic, cultural, historical, architectural, political, artistic, and lived.

CityNeighborhoods Paris was built to make those layers visible.

The site explores Paris through five major layers:

Arrondissements — the city’s twenty municipal districts.

Administrative Quarters — the eighty official quarters that divide each arrondissement into smaller civic geographies.

Neighborhood Councils — the local participatory districts that reveal another layer of civic life.

Deux Rives — the Right Bank and Left Bank, one of Paris’s most enduring geographic and cultural distinctions.

Cultural Neighborhoods — the historic, lived, and named districts that often cross official borders and carry the city’s cultural memory.

Together, these layers create a more complete portrait of Paris. A single place may belong to one arrondissement, sit within an administrative quarter, fall inside a neighborhood council area, participate in a cultural neighborhood, and belong to either the Right Bank or Left Bank. None of these layers cancels out the others. Each deepens the story.

That is the heart of CityNeighborhoods Paris.

It is not a typical Paris guide. It is not a travel checklist, a restaurant ranking, or a list of “best neighborhoods.” It is a photographic, civic, and cultural atlas — a way of exploring Paris through the overlapping systems that shape its identity.

The project is also still growing.

Many of the current pages use maps and written histories as their foundation while the photography archive continues to develop. Over the coming weeks and months, I will begin adding more images from my Paris fieldwork, including photographs from last summer and this spring. As with CityNeighborhoods.NYC, the site will continue to evolve as the archive deepens.

For me, this launch is also a milestone in the larger CityNeighborhoods journey.

CityNeighborhoods.NYC remains the origin project — the first full city atlas, rooted in the neighborhoods of New York City.

CityNeighborhoods Paris is the first major international expansion of that method.

And CityNeighborhoods Worldwide now serves as the larger portal connecting these city atlases with fieldwork, maps, photography, and future neighborhood studies across other places I have visited, photographed, and documented.

The work began in New York, but the idea was always larger than one city.

To walk a city with attention is to discover that places are never only what they first appear to be. A neighborhood is not only a name. It is a convergence of streets, histories, buildings, institutions, borders, memories, habits, and meanings. It is shaped by official maps and informal life, by architecture and atmosphere, by what is preserved and what is forgotten.

That belief is what connects New York and Paris.

Different cities. Different histories. Different civic systems. But the same underlying commitment: to look closely, to walk carefully, to photograph with attention, and to reveal the layered fabric of urban life.

I hope you will take some time to explore CityNeighborhoods Paris.

Start with the homepage, or visit the page that explains the mission, values, and purpose behind the site. From there, you can move through the arrondissements, administrative quarters, neighborhood councils, cultural neighborhoods, and the two banks of the Seine.

Explore CityNeighborhoods Paris:
https://paris.cityneighborhoods.co

Thank you, as always, for following and supporting CityNeighborhoods. This project has grown far beyond what I first imagined when I began photographing New York’s neighborhoods. I am deeply grateful to be able to share this next chapter with you.

With appreciation,

Sam
CityNeighborhoods.NYC