A Decade and Two Elections After Banning Billboards, This French City Still Doesn’t Want Them Back
Gilles Namur points at a stretch of Cours Lafontaine, a street through the historic center of Grenoble, and describes what used to stand there: a block of concrete, an advertising column, nothing anyone would call beautiful. Today the same spot has a bike path, a row of trees, and a clear view toward the mountains that the city’s most famous writer once described. The ads are gone.
Namur is Grenoble’s deputy mayor for quality of life, biodiversity, and mobility, and the change didn’t happen by accident. In November 2014, the city’s incoming mayor announced he would not renew the contract of the company that managed hundreds of billboards across Grenoble. When that contract expired the next year, the city took down 326 advertising structures, more than 2,000 square meters of surface area, and became the first city in Europe to ban billboards from public spaces. Many of the empty spots got trees instead.
The reasoning went beyond aesthetics: a review of over 50 studies on visual pollution, conducted between 2008 and 2023, found links to lower concentration and higher anxiety. “Alcohol, cars, junk food, women depicted as sexual objects,” Namur says, of what the ads had been selling. “We don’t want it.”
Grenoble kept going past the easy part. In 2020, the city worked with 49 neighboring municipalities to ban advertising near schools and in heritage areas and to limit billboard sizes on private property too, taking down 117 more. Today, advertising is banned in every public space in Grenoble and in roughly 90 percent of the rest of the city. On Cours Lafontaine, a counter tracks the cyclists who now use the bike path where the billboards stood: more than 600,000 so far this year.
“You don’t realize until you leave and go somewhere like Paris and it’s a big shock to the senses,” says Gabrielle Reynaud, a 25-year-old teacher who lives nearby. “We’re used to a more tranquil life here.”
The clearest sign the policy worked is how little anyone talks about reversing it. Grenoble has been through two mayoral elections since the ban began, and neither one touched it. “It’s a non-subject,” Namur says. Other French cities have since followed with their own versions, from Lyon’s digital ad ban to Montpellier tripling the required distance between billboards and schools, and Grenoble’s city hall says it now fields calls from as far away as Geneva and Denmark, asking how they did it.
