It’s not every day that a new bridge is laid over the Seine. The hour may be late, this October 28, the perimeter cordoned off, several curious people came to look at this structure of 1,500 tons of steel, 120 meters long, climb perpendicular to the river, between Ile-Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) and Saint-Denis. A small group of officials, architects and engineers, all in fluorescent orange, attend the same spectacle. There is the prefect, the sub-prefect, the president of the department, elected officials. No big ceremony. Their almost childish eagerness to come down to see the work more closely is worth all the talk.
A woman lingers on the terrace of the site’s living quarters. Brigitte Philippon is the one who, seventeen years earlier, drew a line on the plan of the “river eco-district” which would replace the Printemps warehouses on Ile-Saint-Denis. A feature for a pedestrian-bicycle-bus bridge (138 meters in total) which would put the metro less than ten minutes from the new housing, obvious for an urban planner. But the 32 million euros needed (a little less, at the time) were nobody’s priority, except for the mayor, who did not have the means. Twenty years is about the time it took for the burying of the power lines that shear the sky just above to also become a reality.
Above all, do not believe that good fairies have suddenly decided to finance the projects that were piling up in the cupboards. In September 2017, Paris won the 2024 Olympic (OG) and Paralympic Games, and it was decided to install the athletes’ village, a centerpiece in the organization of the event (more than 14,000 beds), on industrial land in the north of the capital: around fifty hectares, straddling three municipalities (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, L’Ile-Saint-Denis), a stone’s throw from the Stade de France. The Grand Paris Express was arriving, the Seine added magic to the whole. Suddenly, the bridge was financed, the disappearance of the pylons programmed (80 million euros). In the lot, we even added a noise barrier – on one side only – to muffle the noise of the A86 which overlooks everything.
1.1 billion in public funds
What is the repair of territorial and social fractures in Seine-Saint-Denis? The attention paid to this department, where the XXe century has laid down all that it can produce most massively – two airports, three motorways, TGV lines, a considerable number of towers and housing bars -, is it conditioned on the organization of high sports , these moments when the youngest department of metropolitan France becomes the showcase, even the pride, of a country, as during the 1998 Football World Cup? This territory whose elected officials fight every day so that a child who is born there, a person who settles there has the same chances to learn, to train, to work, to be cared for, to find housing as the others. …
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