IN May last year, as he was strolling down a sidestreet in the heart of Paris's Latin Quarter, Alexandre de Nunez spotted a sign on the front of a building near the white dome of the Pantheon. 'For rent', it said, with one provision 'For bookshop.'

Officially inaugurated this week by Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, the Franco-Argentinian's cosy new El Salon del Libro is one of a cluster of bookshops opening in the city's historic district of erudition, where students mill around the Sorbonne and lecturers recline in the Luxembourg gardens.

Three such businesses have sprung up in recent months, and several more are on their way. But these new arrivals were not conceived in the usual fashion. Concerned by a sharp decline in the number of bookshops in what Delanoe called “part of Paris's intellectual soul”, the Paris authorities have facilitated their birth.

As part of a determinedly interventionist urban strategy, the city hall has commissioned town planners to scout for premises in the fifth arrondissement that would make suitable bookshops or small publishing houses and cultural venues. The aim to reverse a worrying trend which from 2000 to 2008 saw the number of cherished librairies (bookshops) drop by 231 to 137.

“The Latin Quarter remains the place in France with the highest density of literary and intellectual education, production and publication ... Yet the presence of bookshops in the Latin Quarter is now under threat,” said the city hall in a mission statement. “Independent bookshops find themselves faced with competition from new forms of selling, like supermarkets and the Internet.”

Two of the most iconic shops, Le Divan and La Librairie des PUF, have moved away, it added, to be replaced respectively by a luxury fashion boutique and a cheap clothing store. The boulevard Saint Michel is peppered with high street chains.

When inaugurating de Nunez' Spanish-language store on Tuesday, Delanoe defended his policy of intervening in the laws of the market in order to maintain commercial diversity and keep alive a sense of community. Paris, he said, “was not Paris” without its bookshop at the corner of the street.

“We are one of the cities in the world with the biggest number of local shops, and these local shops are the economy, employment, but it's also a way of living,” he told journalists. Insisting that the French capital was unique and envied for its preservation of local and independent shops, he said any attempt to resemble big 'Anglo-Saxon' cities would be disastrous “It would be madness. It would be an insult to our soul, an insult to our identity but also to our economic interests.”

— The Guardian, London