Every four years, when the Summer Olympics and Paralympics take place, a parade of architectural trinkets – stadiums, velodromes, symbolic things like the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London 2012 – are presented to the world’s more or less fascinated gaze. Every time the question arises about the inheritance. What use will these structures be once their few weeks of glory are over? The answers range from the decaying facilities left behind by Athens in 2004 to the compromise that saw London’s Olympic stadium become the home of West Ham United football club.
Paris, the host city in 2024, promises to be different. Most events will take place in existing buildings such as the Stade de France, originally built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, or in temporary locations in the heart of the city. Beach volleyball and blind football take place in front of the Eiffel Tower, BMX freestyle and skateboarding on the Place de la Concorde. The opening ceremony will be a 6km river parade through what the official blurb calls the “impressive playing field that the athletes will make their own once it ends: the City of Light itself”.
The ex-rugby player Pierre Rabadan, now deputy mayor of Paris in charge of sport and the Olympic Games, tells me that the “emblematic” project of the Games is not a building at all, but the “reconquest” of the Seine. It is being cleaned up so that it can host marathon swimming and triathlons, and then the public can swim in it forever. This is part of a national, regional and urban project worth 1.4 billion euros plan baignade, to cleanse the river from its source to the sea. It also reinforces the ambition of the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to turn Paris into what has been called, in more hyperbolic moments, ‘the greenest big city in Europe’.
A proposal to triple parking fees for SUVs will be put to a referendum in February
She wants to make it a paradise with low pollution and healthy living, as friendly to pedestrians and bicycles as possible, with new developments planned to promote community life. This is a long-term undertaking, dating back to Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor from 2001 to 2014, but the Olympic Games have been brought in to boost this. Despite what Rabadan calls “a lot of political resistance,” the Olympics gave us “the opportunity to accelerate the transformation we need.”
The program included the removal of traffic from the left and right banks of the Seine, in 2013 and 2016 respectively, which had been highways since the 1960s. Key public spaces have been gradually made more pedestrian-friendly, such as the Place de la République in 2014 and the Place de la Bastille in 2020. An ‘urban forest’ of 478 trees is now being planted on the Place de Catalogne, a major traffic roundabout near Gare Montparnasse. There are plans to turn the Champs-Élysées into a pedestrian-friendly ‘extraordinary garden’.
Other items in this pro-pedestrian, pro-bicycle, pro-tree, anti-car banquet include 600 miles of bike lanes and 200,000 new street trees. Paris Respire (Paris Breathes), the plan to close parts of the city to motorized traffic one Sunday a month, has been running since 2016. A proposal to triple parking fees for SUVs will be put to a referendum in February. There are small-scale and local changes, as well as the transformations of the city’s most famous places. Three hundred rues aux ecoles Streets outside schools have been cleared of traffic so parents and children can gather and linger, and there should be another 100 by 2025. In some streets, parking spaces have been replaced by trees and planters. In the areas where the Olympic Games will be held, ‘traffic restriction zones’ will be installed, where only permit holders will be allowed to drive.
The pursuit of a civilized urban life extends to 11 projects completed under the banner of Réinventer Paris, with another 11 in the pipeline, where consortia competed to develop state-owned sites, provided they achieved such desirabilities as sustainable construction and design, encouraging urban agriculture and the mixing of uses and social groups. An example is Îlot fertile by Paris-based TVK, billed as the “first carbon-free district in Paris”. Here, homes and workplaces are arranged in blocks, partly made of environmentally friendly stone, around gardens and allotments.
Another example is Morland Mixité, by British architect David Chipperfield, and local practice BRS, where a 1950s civilian building has been converted into a ‘vibrant campus’ containing a youth hostel, apartments at both market and subsidized prices, a food market, a kindergarten, bicycle repair shop and a luxury hotel and restaurant. There are arcades, said to be inspired by the 17th-century Place des Vosges, although their parabolic concrete vaults have more of a 1960s space-age feel about them. There are densely planted courtyards and roof gardens by landscape architect Michel Desvigne, using ‘organic cultivation methods’, and a permanent art installation by Olafur Eliasson’s Studio Other Spaces, an ‘immersive optical device’ that reflects Parisian street life in the building’s ceilings . top two floors of the project’s central tower.
These changes are not universally popular. Various forms of traffic apocalypse have been predicted, at least since the closure of the highways along the Seine, but none have materialized. A campaign on X, #saccageparis, which roughly translates as Trashed Paris, highlights issues such as overflowing bins, unregulated street traders and the loss of historic ironwork, which its anonymous contributors say are more pressing issues than Hidalgo’s green ambitions. It is rightly pointed out that Paris’s suburbs are in greater need of investment and creativity than the urban planning arrondissements in its jurisdiction.
It is true that the design quality of the interventions is not at the level of Adolphe Alphand, the 19th century engineer whose parks and street furniture complemented the boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann, or Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau entrances to metro stations. They tend to have a makeshift atmosphere, with small areas of planting competing to thrive in expanses of paving. Emmanuel Grégoire, deputy mayor in charge of urban planning, tells me that at least some of these arrangements are temporary and will be improved. The priority was on getting things done: “If you wait for something to be perfect, it will take too long.”
Perhaps the worst thing you can say about Hidalgo’s projects is that rhetoric can overshadow reality. Some of the promised “urban forests” for large spaces will not materialize, and the Réinventer Paris program, launched in 2014, is taking time to be implemented. Some of the new planting looks a bit shabby – even if it takes time to grow – and is compromised, with patches of greenery between the vehicles.
The ‘city of 15 minutes’ – the concept promoted by French-Colombian urban planner and Hidalgo advisor Carlos Moreno – also seems overhyped. This proposes that cities be planned in such a way that everything you need for everyday life – workplace, shops, schools, recreation and sports facilities – can be reached on foot or by bike within fifteen minutes of your home. strengthening communities and reducing car use. It has gained some international notoriety thanks to right-wing conspiracy theories that see it as an insidious attempt by global elites to take away personal freedoms.
In Paris, the 15-minute city is everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the historic city is already an almost perfect embodiment of the idea, as a fifteen-minute radius from almost any point will cover a rich range of life and culture. On the other hand, it is difficult to find much evidence that its current application to planning policy makes a big difference in the lives of Parisians. The problem with The 15 Minute City may be less that it’s a diabolical plot by lizard people than that it’s a bit boring.
But there is no doubt that things like a 1,000% increase in cycling and opening the riverbanks to pedestrians and swimmers will be important achievements. The Olympic push, as in the run-up to almost every edition of the Games, is accompanied by some nervousness about whether everything will be ready, but the decision to make the most of the city’s considerable urban assets, rather than adding new architectural trophies is hard to fault.
In the 1980s and 1990s, architectural writers made pilgrimages to Paris to see the building big projects – the Louvre pyramid, the gigantic cube-shaped ‘arch’ of La Défense, the somewhat tacky Opéra Bastille, which themselves were heirs to the Center Pompidou and the Eiffel Tower. Now we’re staring at cycle paths and bushes. Considering that Paris is already rich in monuments, the current desire to make it more pleasant and healthy for citizens seems absolutely right.