A Decade and Two Elections After Banning Billboards, This French City Still Doesn’t Want Them Back.

Grenoble stripped advertising from its streets a decade ago, and the surest sign it worked is that no one there is trying to bring it back. The city has held two mayoral elections since, and changed mayors, and neither vote laid a finger on the ban. “It’s a non-subject,” says Gilles Namur, the deputy mayor.

It started in 2014, when Éric Piolle became mayor and declined to renew the deal with the firm that ran the city’s billboards. When that contract lapsed the following year, Grenoble took down some 326 advertising structures and became the first large European city to clear billboards from its public spaces. Where the panels had stood, the city planted trees.

The case for it went past looks. The city points to research linking a landscape of advertising to worse concentration and higher anxiety, and Namur is blunt about what the panels had been selling. “Alcohol, cars, junk food, women depicted as sexual objects,” he says. “We don’t want it.”

For the people who live with the result, the difference registers most when they leave. “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 school teacher who lives near the center. “We’re used to a more tranquil life here.” Along one street where billboards once stood, a bike path now runs, and by the city’s count hundreds of thousands of cyclists have used it this year.

Grenoble kept tightening the rules after the first sweep, extending limits across its metropolitan area of 49 towns, and advertising is now barred from its public spaces and most of the rest of the city. Laurence Ruffin, who won the mayor’s office in 2026, inherited the policy and kept it. Other French cities have taken up versions of their own, and Grenoble’s city hall says it now fields questions from as far away as Geneva and Denmark, from officials who want to know how they did it.