How Paris Made the City the Stage for the 2024 Olympics

The Washington Post

18:49 JST, July 26, 2024

PARIS – From Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium to the Olympic Park in London, host cities have typically set the stage for the Olympic Games with ambitious new construction that demonstrates their engineering prowess and permanently transforms their skylines.

There will be little of that when the world tunes in to the Olympics here this week. The best stage for “Paris 2024,” organizers concluded, was Paris. They hope the city will look and feel like the best version of itself.

In a first for the Summer Olympics, the Opening Ceremonies on Friday will take place outside a stadium. Athletes will float down the Seine in a parade of more than 100 boats. Along the way, they’ll pass the expanse of Place de la Concorde, set up for skateboarding competitions; Pont Alexandre III bridge, the finish line for triathlon and marathon swimming; the glass-roofed Grand Palais, the site of Olympic fencing; and the Eiffel Tower, which will serve as a backdrop for beach volleyball.

The Olympic organizers selected venues that allow Paris to showcase its distinctive monuments and its rich history – while avoiding the cost and carbon footprint of major construction projects.

Organizers also want visitors to appreciate how green-minded the French capital has become. They are promoting their efforts to use sustainable materials and reduce single-use plastics at the venues. They want people to know that the Olympic sites within Paris are all reachable by bicycle, via a vast network of dedicated bike lanes and a newly expanded inventory of rentals.

Officials have emphasized, too, that these are socially conscious Olympics. They have tried to spur urban renewal by putting the athletes’ village and a new aquatics center in one of the most impoverished areas of the city, with plans to turn the facilities over to the community after the athletes leave.

“The Olympics are accelerators of public policies,” said Patricia Pelloux, deputy director of the Paris urban planning agency Apur.

The Paris 2024 strategy, though, has its drawbacks. Embedding the Games in the heart of the city has introduced new complications and security risks. To protect the Opening Ceremonies, authorities have placed much of the city center under lockdown for the past week, causing confusion and frustration for tourists, resulting in disruption and economic losses for Paris residents, and eliciting comparisons to pandemic-style restrictions.

But French President Emmanuel Macron has encouraged everyone to wait: “We will all see starting Friday why it was worth it.”

A green host city

Paris 2024 organizers say these will be the most sustainable Olympics in the history of the Games, with half the planet-warming emissions produced by recent Summer Games in London and Rio. At the venues, plant-based food will be served at counters made of reused timber pallets. Spectators are encouraged to bring reusable bottles and make use of water fountains.

Some analysts are skeptical about how climate-friendly an event can be when it involves athletes, officials and more than 11 million spectators coming in from around the world, in many cases via carbon-heavy air travel. But there is no question that being named the host city for these Olympics helped Paris go green.

“The city of Paris is doing a lot to get prepared for the impacts of climate change,” said Vincent Viguié, a climate change adaptation researcher. “It’s one of the most advanced cities.”

The city government, under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, has used the influx of money and attention associated with the Olympics to advance efforts to reduce car traffic, extend bike lanes and open more space for pedestrians – including turning a highway along the right bank of the Seine into a park. City officials claim their policies have reduced air pollution by 40 percent.

While the plan to hold swimming competitions in the notoriously dirty Seine appeared laughably impossible when Paris submitted its Olympic bid, Hidalgo triumphantly swam in the river last week – one decade and $1.5 billion later. After the Games, city officials have promised to create river-water pools for the public.

The Olympics are also allowing city planners to experiment with temporary road closures that could become permanent. La Concorde is usually one of the city’s most congested squares. But it has been closed to traffic while it serves as a competition venue. Officials hope enthusiasm may grow for parts of the square to be converted into a park space.

“It allows us to trigger a lasting evolution of these places and to transform their use,” said Pierre Rabadan, the deputy mayor responsible for the Olympics.

But the city government’s climate-oriented drive is not uncontroversial. Conservatives view it as overreach that is prioritizing the interests of wealthy urban dwellers at the expense of Parisian businesses. Some researchers worry that Hidalgo’s policies have only pushed the city’s pollution problem out of the city center. The closure of roads has led to more congestion in the outskirts, thus worsening pollution in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas.

In Aubervilliers, on the outskirts of Paris, some residents are frustrated that Olympic preparations resulted in the bulldozing of an acre of a community garden to make way for a swimming pool – not the main aquatics center residents lobbied for, but a lesser training facility.

“It’s a disaster,” said Gérard Muller, 70, deputy secretary of the community’s governing council. “It caused a lot of sorrow.”

A court ruling that the garden should be kept intact came after parts had already been destroyed.

A city attuned to inequality

Four miles away, in Île-Saint-Denis, people who spoke with The Washington Post said the Olympics were finally pushing their community in the right direction.

Perched on an island in the Seine, this suburb of 8,500 inhabitants feels like a world away from the sparkling Eiffel Tower that residents can see in the distance. Île-Saint-Denis has struggled with drug dealers, high crime rates and dilapidated public housing estates. One-third of people here live in poverty.

But French officials have hoped to give the area a boost by situating the Olympic Village in a way that it crosses three underserved communities: Île-Saint-Denis, Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen.

Over the course of the Olympics and Paralympic Games, as many as 22,250 athletes will be staying here. Afterward, the plan is to transform the village into a neighborhood with offices, shops and 2,500 mixed-income apartments.

Some residents have already moved into new buildings nearby. Their balconies tower over houseboats, new parks and construction sites. A new bridge connects the island with Saint-Denis, where an extended metro line has brought central Paris and its opportunities closer. Officials hope to open a public beach in the newly swimmable Seine.

Mohamed Gnabaly, the mayor of Île-Saint-Denis, said the Olympics have served as a catalyst for projects that were long delayed. “We had these projects. The vision has not changed. What has changed is the ambition,” Gnabaly said.

On an April afternoon, Gnabaly stood in a school gymnasium wearing a sash in the colors of the French flag to announce finalized plans for “Station Afrique,” where African athletes, fans and local residents can watch broadcasts of Olympics events. The viewing area, Gnabaly said to applause, “will be a place of pride.”

Many people appear to share the mayor’s enthusiasm about the impact of the Olympics. “We have new people moving in, new businesses, a new restaurant,” said Isaia Danican, 16, who is part of a breakdancing association and was practicing next to the Olympic Village.

“I hope the Olympics will change the image of our neighborhood,” said Maria Pasquato, 31, a Paris tour guide who was born in Ethiopia and moved to France eight years ago.

The changes that have come with the Olympics could also make life more expensive, however. Pasquato said she has already noticed a rise in rents, as the area becomes more attractive to central Paris residents who are looking for bigger or cheaper places.

The social commitments of these Olympics have also been thrown into doubt by a rise in evictions and removals of homeless people – many of them migrants. A collective of 90 organizations accused authorities of expelling thousands of homeless people from the city center and around Olympic venues as part of a “social cleansing” ahead of the Games.

Mayor Gnabaly rejected accusations that his town has suffered such negative impacts. He said buildings from which residents were relocated in Île-Saint-Denis were dilapidated and without working elevators. Moving residents elsewhere is also a new beginning for them, he said.

Anthony Ikni, a social worker, disagreed. When families are moved, they lose access to education, work and health care. “Evictions have consequences,” he said.

A destination for tourism

Paris is already one of the most visited cities in the world. Tourism contributes $36 billion annually to the region. But French officials hope to remind Olympic viewers of all there is to see – and not just in the heart of Paris. Equestrian events will be held on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. Sailing races will take off from the Mediterranean port of Marseille. Farthest away, surfing competitions are happening in Tahiti, part of French Polynesia.

Lorick Joseph, who works with the organizing committee, said the choice of Versailles, with its “unique and fantastic backdrop,” was an easy one.

Versailles conservation architect Raphaël Gastebois said the Olympics are a good fit for the former royal hunting grounds, which have long been a “laboratory” for efforts to portray France from its best side.

“The risk for a place like Versailles is to look only like a conservative place,” Gastebois said. He cited the use of local soil for the competitions, and the long-term opening of a new gate for Versailles residents as examples of how the Olympics will benefit the community.

But many Versailles residents appear unconvinced of the benefits.

“We’re going to flee – the crowded transport network is going to be hell, and everything will be extremely expensive,” said Paul Charmeil, 21. He worries that the organizers are not creating enough incentives for tourism to truly change.

“Many tourists just come to see the palace and then they leave,” he said.

Versailles’ Equestrian Academy is only a few hundred meters away from the palace, but on most days the view is blocked by dozens of parked tour buses and streams of visitors.

Academy spokeswoman Laura Geisler says the town needs to create new tourism habits. “What’s necessary is to also attract them to Versailles as a city,” she said, so that local retailers and events – such as the academy’s shows – benefit, too.

Stéphane Pinon, 37, a wine seller in central Versailles, said he anticipates little additional business from the Games.

But having grown up in one of Versailles’ poorer neighborhoods, he hopes the Olympics will show the world that there’s more to France than centuries-old palaces and monuments.

“The image of Versailles is wealth and chic,” Pinon said. “But not all neighborhoods here are rich.”