Trails

Discover the Metropolitan Trails network. For each trail, we mention the supporting structure or the author— except when it was produced directly by the Trail Agency. Trails are presented in the chronological order of their design or publication.

Bordeaux — Terres communes (Common Lands) — Bruit du Frigo

Name : Terres communes (Common Lands)

Length : 250 km

Scale : Greater Bordeaux

Authors : Le Bruit du Frigo, Yvan Detraz

The "Terres Communes" (Common Lands) Trail offers 300 km of hiking trails through the Bordeaux suburbs.
The route, in the form of a chain with links, is made up of 15 joined loops. Each loop corresponds to a day's walk.
A large loop of 170 km, running from one loop to the other, also allows to walk the complete tour of the city in 9 days.

Genesis
Since 1999, the architect Yvan Detraz has been proposing the creation of hiking trails to connect abandoned spaces, and to structure the peri-urban spaces of our megacities.
From 2010, he has been developing with Bruit du frigo and Zébra3/Buy-Sellf "Refuges périurbains" which allow to spend the night in selected areas of the Bordeaux agglomeration.

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Milano — Sentieri Metropolitani — Gianni Biondillo & Gianluca Migliavacca

Name : Sentieri Metropolitani

Length : 400 km

Scale : Greater Milan

Authors : Gianni Biondillo et Gianluca Migliavacca

Partners : Trekking Italia

A network of circular and radial routes offers more than 400 km of urban and peri-urban roads that redesign the city. With the App Sentieri Metropolitani you can choose from 10 routes.
The trail aims to become a true general museum of urban memory.

Genesis
From an itinerary on Milan's ring road ("Tangenziale"), which is the subject of a book in 2010, and a series of radials centred on the Duomo, is born the Milanese metropolitan trail network implemented by the architect and writer Gianni Biondillo, the architect and urban hiker Gianluca Migliavacca and the association Trekking Italia.

In 2022, Gianni Biondillo published Sentieri Metropolitani (Bollati Boringhieri editions), an essay that invites us to reconnect with walking in the city from Milan's metropolitan footpaths.

Marseille — GR2013 — Bureau des Guides

Name : GR2013

Length : 365 km

Scale : Greater Marseille

Authors : Baptiste Lanaspeze et Nicolas Memain avec le Cercle des Marcheurs

Partners : Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013, Le Cercle des Marcheurs, CG13, the departmental committee for walking and hiking, and Wildproject.

Partenaires Marseille

The GR2013 is the first official and marked Metropolitan Trail in the world. Its 365 km route in the shape of an 8 stretches around a wide interior sea (the "Etang de Berre") and a suburbanized mountain range (the "massif de l'Etoile").
The first "GR" ("Grande Randonnée": long-distance hiking trail) in a metropolitan territory, it welcomed more than 150,000 hikers in 2013, and has been the subject of 250 press publications. Awarded the Medal for Urban Planning by the Academy of Architecture and "Best New Trail" by National Geographic, the GR2013 marks the development of metropolitan trails in Europe and around the world.

Genesis
Conceived by the publisher Baptiste Lanaspeze for Marseille Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture, the GR2013 was designed by the artist-urbanist Nicolas Mémain and carried by the artists and producers associated of the "Cercle des Marcheurs". Its founders gave birth to a dedicated organization, the "Bureau des Guides du GR2013", which has been developing since 2014 cultural projects around issues of territory, planning and ecology.

The GR2013 has hosted many artistic projects, including:
TRAILPOINTS: A METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE OBSERVATORY by Bryan Connell
A PHOTOGRAPHIC OBSERVATORY by Geoffroy Mathieu and Bertrand Stofleth
PROMENADES SONORES by Radio Grenouille.
HOTEL DU NORD Discovering Marseilles by the North

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London — InspiralLondon — counterproductions

Name : InspiralLondon

Length : 300 miles

Scale : Greater London

Authors : Charlie Fox

InspiralLondon is an ambitious artist-led project, working collectively to create a new walk trail spiraling through London, beginning at Kings Cross and ending at Gravesend.
The 300-mile pathway is divided into 32 segments, allowing the public to experience the city as one vast art space in which to re-imagine the built environment.
Expanding on the potential of walking as art, we use a variety of artistic practices and artistic interventions to offer an alternative platform that provides accessible and pleasurable ways to delve into under-explored and forgotten parts of the metropolis.

Genesis
After having carried out artistic interventions on the GR2013, the artist Charlie Fox draws in the Greater London (the Mecca of walking artists) a spiral between the station of Saint-Pancras and Gravesend, burial place of Pocahontas and starting point of Joseph Conrad's In the Heart of Darkness—and of the conquest of the world by England. Since 2014, he has been marking out each month with a collective of artists and activists a section of his itinerary, inaugurated in 2017.

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Istanbul — Between Two Seas — Serkan Taycan

Name : Between Two Seas

Length : 60 km

Scale : Istanbul suburbia

Authors : Serkan Taycan

Partners : 13th Istanbul Biennial

“Between Two Seas” is a four-day walking route in the near west of Istanbul, between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea. It allows one to experience on foot the threatening transformation of Istanbul. With a total length of 60 kilometres, the trail is composed of four 15-kilometer parts can also be walked in 4 days. Layer by layer, the route goes from the outermost periphery of the city to its centre. It crosses rural and forest areas, and water basins. The project has been supported by 13th Istanbul Biennial.

Genesis
Inspired by the GR2013 trail, the photographer Serkan Taycan draws a trail along the route of the future pharaonic canal planned by the President Erdogan between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. With a collective, he travels and marks it out live during a 4-day performance walk.

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Paris — The Greater Paris Trail

Name : The Greater Paris Trail

Length : 615 km

Scale : Morphological Greater Paris (92-93-94, 77-78-91-95)

Authors : Paul-Hervé Lavessière, Jens Denissen, Denis Moreau

Partners : Métropole du Grand Paris, Société du Grand Paris, Région Ile-de-France, Pavillon de l'Arsenal, APUR…

Partenaires Paris

615 km on foot, for 30 days of walking in the largest French-speaking metropolis in the world: the Greater Paris Trail will be the first cultural facility of the metropolis.
Designed and carried out by artists, architects, town planners, landscape designers..., it is being built in partnership with several public and private institutions, including the Greater Paris Metropolitan Authority, the Société du Grand Paris and the Ile-de-France Region.
Articulating the 19th century suburbs (first ring) and late 20th century "villes nouvelles" (second ring) across more than 150 townships and 7 departments, it will be the largest public space in the Ile-de-France region.
Designed in 2016, it is delivered to the public in 2020 under the form of a route, a book and an exhibition at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal.

Genesis
On the occasion of the birth of the Metropolis and the construction of the Grand Paris Express, several projects converge in 2016—"banlieuedeparis.org" (since 1995), "Le Voyage Métropolitain" (since 2014), "Le Révolution de Paris" (since 2014) to create together the Metropolitan Trail of the Greater Paris (SMGP). The design of this trail took the form of a series of monthly expeditions, participative scouting, associating authors, the public, and local authorities.

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Tunis — Houmani

Name : Houmani

Length : 180 km

Scale : Greater Tunis

Authors : Baptiste Lanaspeze & Paul-Hervé Lavessière with Rym Ghouma & Khirallah Ben Hafaiedh

Partners : Région Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur, Association des Amis du Belvédère (AAB), Volubilis, Palais de Tokyo, MuCEM

"Houmani" is a 180-km long original itinerary (10 days of walking) to go and meet the inhabitants and the habitats of the Greater Tunis area (2 million inhabitants, 900 km2). This trail goes through the 3 gouvernorats of Tunis, Ben Arous and Ariana.
An international workshop with students (in Urbanism, Public Policy, Art, Human Sciences and Ecology) has taken place in 2016 in order to discover, analyze and report the metropolitan landscapes in a collective publication.
Editorial committe: Sameh Arfaoui, Khirallah Ben Hafaiedh, Amine Rachid, Rym Ghouma, Pascal Menoret, Julien Seroussi, Chris Brooks.

Genesis
In the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, the Greater Tunis Trail unfolds in 3 loops from the Belvedere Park. Designed at the Palais de Tokyo and the Mucem, it will be the subject of a survey and an international workshop in 2015.
It is called "Houmani" (which means "people from the neighborhood" in Tunisian dialect), in homage to Hamzaoui's 2013 song Med Amine and Kafon, which became an anthem of the Tunisian suburbs.

Avignon — Provence Express

Name : Provence Express

Length : 200 km

Scale : Avignon, Carpentras, Orange, Cavaillon

Authors : Baptiste Lanaspeze, Paul-Hervé Lavessière

Partners : Région Sud, Département de Vaucluse, Volubilis

The Provence Express trail connects together 4 Provençal cities: Avignon, Carpentras, Orange and Cavaillon. It explores the urban plain of Avignon and of the Comtat Venaissin, the "French Garden", that was outside the French Kingdom between the 13th century and 1792. Between the Mont Ventoux and the Rhône river, Fontaine de Vaucluse and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, this trail explores the ordinary landscapes of contemporary Provence.
It was named after the railway system that allowed strawberries that were picked in fields to be in Parisian market stalls the morning after: Provence Express.

Genesis
The reopening in 2015 of the Avignon-Carpentras local railway (closed in 1939) was the occasion for the creation of the Provence Express trail, which explores a sprawled metropolitan area that corresponds to the historic territory of the Comtat Venaissin.
This area, marked by agricultural activity (thanks to the irrigation system of the Sorgues and the Durance rivers, and to the "Provence Express" rail system for shipping early produce) has become a national emblem of the peri-urban.

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Athens — Attiko Monopati — Jordi Ballesta

Name : Attiko Monopati

Length : 250 km

Scale : Greater Athens / Attica

Authors : Jordi Ballesta

Partners : Institut français d'Athènes, Paths of Greece, Mucem

Since the spring of 2018, a trail for hiking, creation and urban research, called the Attiko Monopati, crosses the Lekanopedio and more broadly all of Attica. This trail joins Marathon to Piraeus, continues to Megara and returns to Athens, then heads towards the airport, Lavrio and Sounio.
The Attiko Monopati is conceived as a tool for questioning our contemporary ways of living, building and planning, as a transport infrastructure that allows us to explore the city in all its peculiarities, and as a linear place that one inhabits through walking. It aims to discover intimately and slowly the morphological and ecological diversity of the Athenian urban complex, without any motorized vehicle.

Genesis
Crossing the Attica from East to West through a lace that is tied to the "Mount of Turks" in the heart of the metropolis, the Attiko Monopati is a project initiated by the geographer and photographer Jordi Ballesta, who has been intensely surveying this territory since 2000. The contemporary boundaries of the Athenian metropolis correspond to the administrative region of Attica—the ancient territory of the city-state of Athens.

Toulon — ECUME — Métropole TPM / Bureau des guides

Name : ECUME

Length : 150 km

Scale : Toulon Métropole

Authors : TPM, Bureau des Guides du GR2013

Partners : N4CL, Région Sud, Bureau des Guides

Le sentier métropolitain de TPM a été réalisé et coordonné par Paul-Hervé Lavessière pour le Bureau des Guides du GR2013 et Sébastien Ruvira pour la Métropole Toulon Provence Méditerranée dans le cadre du projet Européen Nature4CityLIFE.
L'itinéraire définitif a été voté à l'unanimité par les élu-es du territoire en décembre 2022.

Köln — The Cologne Trail — Boris Sieverts

Name : The Cologne Trail

Length : 250 km

Scale : Greater Cologne

Authors : Boris Sieverts

With his Büro für Städtereisen (Urban Travel Agency), the artist Boris Sieverts has been organizing urban explorations in the outskirts of Cologne and other cities around the world since 1995. He designed this metropolitan trail for the Mucem showcase.

Boston — The Boston Metropolitan Trail — Pascal Menoret

Name : The Boston Metropolitan Trail

Length : 243 km

Scale : Boston Streetcar Suburb

Authors : Pascal Menoret

Partners : Mucem

The Boston Metropolitan Trail is a projected grid of eight trails connecting sixteen bus, subway, and commuter rail stations.
The BMT critiques and displaces the image of Boston, which is still dominated by settler colonial fantasies centered on the Boston peninsula. The BMT is the anti-Freedom Trail. It takes you to the Deer Island concentration camp and cuts across the Middlesex Fells, this "living monument to Boston's first settlers" (Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles, p. 235).
The BMT is also a transportation infrastructure. The walking city of 1850 (2 miles radius) gave way to the streetcar suburbs of 1900 (10 miles radius) and to today's Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH metropolitan area (50 miles radius, nearly 5 million residents). The streetcar suburbs of 1900 have become the core of today's metropolis. The metropolis of 1900 is the walking city of 2020.

Charleroi — La Boucle noire / La Grande Dérive — Micheline Dufert

Name : La Boucle noire / La Grande Dérive

Ce sentier a été réalisé par Micheline Dufert.