In a major make-over for Paris' city centre, a garden promenade partially covered by a vast glass-and-copper roof was chosen Wednesday for the historic Les Halles site, whose once-lauded 1970s redevelopment is now seen as a prime example of urban blight. After months of deliberation, Paris city hall awarded the task of reworking the site to 55-year-old French architect David Mangin whose vision of a leafy walkway integrating Les Halles with the surrounding cityscape was the simplest and cheapest of four proposals on offer. The scene for 800 years of Paris's meat and vegetable market, Les Halles was gutted in the early 1970s to incorporate Europe's largest city-centre shopping mall and an underground rail hub that that now disgorges hundreds of thousands of commuters every morning.
