After decades of aversion to tall buildings Parisians are being asked to approve bold new towers that would transform their skyline and enable Europe’s most low-rise capital to compete with London and other design-conscious cities.

With the backing of President Sarkozy, the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has unveiled the visions of 11 architects for reviving the north and eastern fringes of the city with projects that include towers as tall as Canary Wharf in London Docklands.

“Why should Paris turn its back on the great wave of architectural creat-ivity that has washed through other great metropoli?” asked the Socialist mayor. “Why is it absurd for Europe’s most densely populated city to reconquer its space vertically?”

His scheme focuses on developing three ramshackle districts at the Porte de la Chapelle in the north and Bercy and Massena on the Seine in the southeast.

The concept sketches were denounced by the Green Party, the junior partner in Mr Delanoë’s administration. “These projects are distinguished by pretentious and quite great ugliness,” said Yves Contassot, the deputy mayor and environment chief on the council.

Mr Delanoë, who has tried to give the city a dynamic new feel, will include his taboo-breaking vision in his pledges for reelection next March. He accepts that his ideas conflict with the wishes of Parisians and his own council. More than 60 per cent of Parisians oppose easing strict height limits and the Socialist-Green council voted against new towers in 2003.

Parisians have been queasy about high buildings since 1889 when Gustave Eiffel foisted his newfangled 323 metre (1,029ft) tower on them. It was supposed to be temporary but no one has suggested demolishing it since the 1920s.

A local law, passed in 1977, bans new buildings taller than 25 metres in the centre and 37 metres elsewhere. The rule was imposed after uproar against the 1972 Tour Montparnasse, the 207-metre skyscraper whose brutal lines blight the mid-Left Bank.

Mr Delanoë says that Paris - which has changed little since it was redesigned in the 1860s – is in danger of becoming a museum, upstaged archtecturally even by its suburbs. La Défense, the business district five miles to the west, is the site for some of Europe’s most avant-garde skyscrapers.

Mr Delanoë said that the Montparnasse tower and a smaller 1970s riverside development on the Left Bank were “absolute urban failures” that would serve as the counter-model for new, environmentally friendly, commercial and residential buildings. One of the conditions for the architects was that no tower should be built on concrete concourses, like those around Montparnasse and La Défense. “I will accept no project that is not a true work of art,” he said.

If reelected the mayor plans to seek council approval to initiate a competition for designs, with construction work to begin two years after later. This would mean that Paris could see its new towers by about 2015.

Times Recommends

• Over the Wall
• Why Africa welcomes the ‘new colonialism’
• Which will come out on top: paper or gold?