Cover image: Construction of the future Saint-Denis – Pleyel station, on November 8, 2022, in Saint-Denis. CHRISTOPHE CAUDROY FOR “THE WORLD”
After Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis will be the second main player in the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In addition to hosting many sporting events, the department will host the Olympic village in Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and the ‘Ile-Saint-Denis, as well as the media village emerging from the ground in Dugny. The opportunity to build new infrastructure in the poorest department of metropolitan France.
Seine-Saint-Denis will benefit from most of the public investment devoted to the construction sites of the Games (1.1 billion euros), but the whole issue is to know if the population will be able to benefit from it in the long term, in this territory. where elected officials fight every day so that a child who is born there, a person who settles there has the same chances of learning, of training, of working, of being cared for, of being housed as the others.
Once they have left, the athletes’ village will for example be transformed to allow, in the summer of 2025, the delivery of 2,800 housing units, as well as 100,000 square meters of offices and services. The construction of new infrastructures must also make it possible to repair some of the many territorial fractures of the department. But will these investments benefit the current population? And will this temporary spotlight be enough to allow the department to catch up with its many socio-economic delays?
“In thirty years, it is not at the Champ-de-Mars or the Trocadéro that we will go to see if Paris has succeeded in its Games, it is in Seine-Saint-Denis that it will be judged”, believes Stéphane Troussel (Socialist Party), president of the departmental council, who is the guest of this chat. He will answer your questions from 4:45 p.m.
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