The work on the Aubervilliers swimming pool, the future training pool for the 2024 Olympic Games (OG), with its solarium built in place of century-old allotments, “achievement” to a primary biodiversity area. This is what the gardeners of the plain of Virtues, north of the capital, have been trying to denounce for months. And this is what the judges of the Paris Administrative Court of Appeal are now saying who, in a judgment delivered on Thursday, February 10, consider that the choice to artificialize one hectare of arable land in an area already largely devoid of spaces green “has an inconsistency” with the environmental objectives of the Ile-de-France master plan (SDRIF). “The urbanization of the western fringe of the Jardins des Vertus [accroîtra] existing ecological discontinuities”adds the court, even though the text provides for the creation of a “ecological corridor”.
The judgment does not, however, suspend work on the swimming pool. They began this fall once the gardeners were expelled from their plots, and the crops returned. Nor does it threaten the construction site of the future station of line 15 of the metro, the Fort d’Aubervilliers station, which must take place in a second phase, once the Olympics are over. On the other hand, Plaine commune has four months to modify its local urban plan and make it compatible with the SDRIF. Because if the regional rule recalls the importance of “densifying and consolidating structuring public transport” – what the arrival of line 15 allows –, it also insists on the need to preserve existing green spaces, and to create new ones in territories that are too heavily concreted. Gold, Aubervilliers, with less than 10 m2 of green space per capita, figure “among the most deprived municipalities” of Ile-de-France, note the judges.
Gardens cultivated for more than a century
In an attempt to find a solution with the gardeners, Grand Paris Aménagement (GPA), the developer and owner of the land, has planned to compensate for the hectare lost by creating new gardens within the walls of Fort d’Aubervilliers, at the foot of of the 900 new future housing units under construction. But this compensation in no way preserves the existing gardens as requested by the SDRIF, “and these new locations are created at least in part in an area which until then was part of the wooded crown of the fort”, therefore in a space that must already be preserved. In other words, the account is not there, explains the court of appeal.
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