Cover image: Inside the district which will serve as the Olympic village this summer, located straddling three cities: Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and L’Ile-Saint-Denis, on January 25, 2024. TERENCE BIKOUMOU FOR “THE WORLD”
Six years after the start of construction, the Olympic village for the Paris 2024 Games was inaugurated on Thursday February 29 by the President of the Republic and the ministers of housing, sports and ecological transition. Built in record time, delivered on time, designed to accommodate 14,250 athletes and their companions between July 26 and August 11 (9,000 during the Paralympic Games which begin at the end of August), it must become a real city district which will accommodate 6,000 residents and 6,000 employees from the end of 2025.
This project, visited by delegations from all over the world, forced developers and builders to review their ways of doing things and to innovate. The environmental requirements applied by Solideo – the company delivering the Olympic works –, which required compliance with the Paris agreements, did not allow construction with the cast-in-place concrete technique, the one that has been crushing everything for decades in France. Wood was favored in a large majority of buildings. The concrete used was up to four times less CO emitting2 than traditional concrete.
Once the athletes have left, builders will remove the temporary partitions and install the missing kitchens and bathrooms to accommodate the first families. There will then be a final challenge to take on. Since the new towns in the 1970s, we have not welcomed so many residents at the same time in the same neighborhood. We will have to find the recipe that allows the mayonnaise to take hold among the inhabitants of this new part of the city, straddling three communes of Seine-Saint-Denis (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and Ile-Saint-Denis), and those who have been installed there, sometimes, for decades.
The first apartments have been on sale since this summer, but for the moment they are having difficulty finding buyers. Due to high prices for the sector (around 7,000 euros per square meter) and the rise in bank rates, buyers are not rushing to invest.
What were the challenges of this project carried out in record time? How does this district, a real city, fit into the three existing municipalities? What does it bring to this rapidly changing territory, which remains very attached to its working-class culture and diversity?
At 5 p.m., Karim Bouamrane (PS), the mayor of Saint-Ouen, answers your questions.
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