by Every four years, when the summer Olympics and Paralympics come around, a parade of architectural baubles – stadiums, velodromes, symbolic objects such as the ArcelorMittal Orbit London 2012 – is offered to a global or less interested audience. Every time, the question of inheritance comes up. What use will these structures be when their few weeks of glory are over? The answers range from the decaying facilities that left Athens in 2004 to the compromise that saw London’s Olympic stadium become the home of West Ham United football club.
Paris, the host city in 2024, promises to be different. Most of the events will be held in existing structures such as the Stade de France, originally built for the 1998 football World Cup, or in temporary venues in the heart of the city. Beach volleyball and blind football will take place in front of the Eiffel Tower, BMX freestyle and skateboarding in the Place de la Concorde. The opening ceremony will be a 6km long river parade and the official grid calls it “a great playground that the athletes will make their own as soon as it finishes, the City of Light itself”.
Former rugby player Pierre Rabadan, now deputy mayor of Paris in charge of sports and the Olympics, tells me that the “imaginary” project of the Games is not a building at all, but the “recapture” of the Seine. It is being cleaned up, so that marathon swimming and triathlons can be held there, and then the public can swim there permanently. This is part of a €1.4bn national, regional and city project, the plan bagnade, to clean the river from its source to the sea. It also reinforces the ambition of the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to turn Paris into “the greenest big city in Europe” in hyperbolic times.
A proposal to triple parking fees for SUVs will be put to a referendum in February
She wants to make it a low-pollution, healthy-living promenade, as pedestrian and cycle-friendly as possible, with new developments planned to promote community life. This is a long-term effort, going back to Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor from 2001 to 2014, but the Olympics have enlisted to boost it. In the face of what Rabadan calls “a lot of political resistance”, the Olympics “gave us an opportunity to accelerate the transformation we need”.
The program included removing traffic from the left and right banks of the Seine, in 2013 and 2016 respectively, which had been expressways since the 1960s. Important public spaces have been gradually made more pedestrian-friendly, such as the Place de la République in 2014 and the Place de la Bastille in 2020. An “urban forest” of 478 trees is now being planted in the Place de Catalonia, where big. traffic circle near the Gare Montparnasse. There are plans to turn the Champs-Élysées into an “extraordinary garden” suitable for pedestrians.
Other items in this pedestrian, cycle, car support feast include 1,000km of cycle lanes and 200,000 new street trees. Paris Respire (Páras Breathes), the scheme in which parts of the city are closed to motorized traffic for one Sunday a month, has been running since 2016. A proposal to triple parking fees for SUVs will be put to a referendum in February. Changes are on a small and local scale, as well as the transformations of the most famous places in the city. Three hundred rues aux écoles Streets have been created outside the schools where traffic has been removed so that parents and children can meet and wait, and another 100 are due by 2025. In some streets, parking spaces have been replaced with trees and planters. “Restricted traffic zones”, which only license holders can drive into, will be installed in places where the Olympic Games will be held and maintained after they have finished.
The pursuit of civic urban life extends to 11 projects completed under the heading of Réinventer Paris, with 11 more on the way, where consortia competed to develop publicly owned sites, provided they achieved desirability such as construction and sustainable design, the encouragement of urban agriculture, and the mix of uses and social groups. One example is a fertile Îlot at the TVK located in Paris, called “the first zero carbon district in Paris”. Here, houses and workplaces are arranged, in blocks built partly with environmentally friendly stone, around gardens and allotments.
Another is Morland Mixité, by British architect David Chipperfield and local practice BRS, where a 1950s civic building has been transformed into a “vibrant campus” with a youth hostel, both market-priced and subsidized apartments, a food market, a nursery school . , a bicycle repair shop and a luxury hotel and restaurant. There are arcades, said to be inspired by the 17th-century Place des Vosges, although their parabolic concrete vaults are more 60s space-age. Landscape architect Michel Desvigne has a densely planted courtyard and roof gardens, using “organic cultivation methods”, and Olafur Eliasson’s Studio Other Spaces has a permanent art installation, an “immersive optical apparatus” that reflects Parisian street life in the ceilings of both floors tallest of the project’s central tower.
These changes are not universally popular. Various types of traffic apocalypse have been predicted, at least since the closure of the Cois Seine highways, without materializing. Campaign on X, #sacageparis, which roughly translates as Trash Paris, highlights things like overflowing bins, unregulated street traders and the loss of historic ironwork, which its anonymous contributors say are more pressing issues than Hidalgo’s green ambitions. It has been rightly pointed out that the suburbs of Paris need more investment and creativity than the blessed urban slums in their jurisdiction.
It is true that the design quality of the interventions is not at the level of Adolphe Alphand, the 19th century engineer whose parks and street furniture completed the boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann, or Hector Guimard’s art nouveau entrances to Métro stations. They tend to have an improvised air, with small areas of planting fighting for progress in paved areas. Emmanuel Grégoire, deputy mayor in charge of urbanization, tells me that some of these arrangements are at least temporary and will be improved. The priority was getting things done: “If you wait for something to be perfect, it’s too long.”
Perhaps the worst thing you can say about Hidalgo’s projects is that rhetoric has a better way of dealing with reality. Some of the “urban forests” promised for large spaces are not to happen, and the program Réinventer Paris, launched in 2014, is taking its time to be implemented. Some of the new planting looks a bit paltry – even allowing that it needs time to grow – and in danger, with pieces of shoe corned verdure between vehicles.
The “15 minute city” – the concept also promoted by the French-Colombian urbanist and adviser to Hidalgo, Carlos Moreno – seems too big. This suggests that cities should be planned so that everything you might need for everyday life – workplace, shops, schools, leisure and sports – is within a quarter of an hour’s walking distance from your home. or by bicycle, in order to strengthen communities and reduce the use of cars. It has gained international notoriety, thanks to right-wing conspiracy theories that see it as an insidious attempt by the global elite to take away personal liberties.
In Paris, the city is 15 minutes everywhere and anywhere. On the one hand, the historic city is already an almost-perfect embodiment of the idea, since a quarter-hour radius from almost any point will cover a rich range of life and culture. On the other hand, it is difficult to find much evidence that its application to planning policy today is making a significant difference to the lives of the people of Paris. The problem with the 15 minute city may be less that it is a fiendish plot by lizard people, than that it is a bit vapid.
But there is no doubt that things like a 1,000% increase in cycling and the opening of the river bank to pedestrians and swimmers will be significant achievements. The Olympic effort, as before almost every edition of the Games, comes with some nervousness about whether everything will be ready, but the decision to make the most of the city’s great urban assets, rather than placing new architectural trophies with him. , it’s hard to fault.
In the 1980s and 90s, architecture writers made pilgrimages to Paris to see. grands projects – The pyramid of the Louvre, the huge cubical “arch” at La Défense, the somewhat insulting Opéra Bastille, which were the heirs of the Center Pompidou and the Eiffel Tower. Now we are looking at cycle lanes and bushes. Since Paris already has a good stock of monuments, the current desire to make it more pleasant and healthy for its citizens seems right.
