The Olympic torch is wending its way through the villes of France, en route to the summer games that open in Paris next month. Beginning July 26, the French capital will host 15,000 athletes, about 10 million ticketed spectators, 26,000 accredited journalists, millions more hangers-on and celebrity seekers, plus 40,000 police officers to keep the paix. Call it the City of Klieg Light.
The weeks of elite athletic events surely will captivate audiences worldwide. But the most spectacular achievement of the Paris games — and largely how the city won its host designation from the International Olympic Committee in 2017 — will happen long after the last medal is won. Because Paris has pledged not just to produce the most sustainable — and affordable — games in modern times but to leverage the event to revitalize its notorious suburbs, or banlieues, for a livable future.
The few permanent structures Paris built for the Olympics — the Athletes Village and the Aquatics Center — were strategically located in the district called Seine-Saint-Denis, where a third of residents live in poverty and where tensions between police and largely immigrant youth have erupted into riots over the years. After the athletes depart, the village will be transformed into housing for 6,000 residents, with up to 40 percent of affordable units, plus schools, hotels, and a 5-acre park. The Aquatics Center will remain open as a multisport facility offering recreation to a community where half the children entering sixth grade don’t know how to swim. And a large new metro station will be added as part of a broader plan to extend the city’s regional rail network.
“The Games are an incredible opportunity,” Mathieu Hanotin, the mayor of St.-Denis, recently told The New York Times. “They will allow us to change our image, and also to deliver housing to help improve the social balance of the city.”
The enduring aftermath of the Paris Olympics is billed as a notable contrast to some past host cities, where abandoned pools and stadiums blight the landscape, even helping popularize a viral photographic genre known as “ruin porn.” In Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Sarajevo, even Beijing, the legacy of the games has largely been overbuilding, overspending, and crumbling, vandalized white elephants.
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This time will be different, Paris officials insist.
The lofty promises have plenty of skeptics, who point to gentrification and displacement as the area is spiffed up in advance of the games, and to other pressing needs that can be overlooked as resources are funneled into the games. The city’s vaunted plan to forgo air conditioning in the Athletes Village — relying instead on a more sustainable geothermal cooling system — has become an object of ridicule, as many wealthier countries, including the United States, are shipping in portable air conditioning units to keep their athletes comfortable. Many Parisians are souring on the whole idea. These are the sorts of headaches that contributed to Boston withdrawing its 2015 bid to host the games.
Still, if any city can pull it off, it’s Paris.
The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is known as an urban visionary, winning global awards for transforming Paris into a model for green innovation. She removed traffic from highways on both banks of the Seine River (think of Storrow and Memorial Drive) and instead built urban beaches and promenades. She created 300 micro school districts that are closed to traffic so parents can walk their children to school. She has pledged that greenhouse gas emissions from the games will be half that of London (2012) and Rio (2016). Even this year’s Olympic torch is eco-friendly: made from 100 percent recycled steel and burning biogas instead of propane.
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Now Hidalgo is using the Olympics to accelerate her ambitious plans for a greener, more accessible Paris, adding still more bike lanes, promising an “urban forest,” and securing funding from the French government to make the Seine River swimmable for the first time in a century. And perhaps the most daunting challenge of all: proving that public investment in troubled urban communities can shift the dynamic and improve the lives of residents without pricing them out of their own homes.
The Olympic promise is all about preserving the social and economic benefits the games generate. Can Paris make them last? Here’s one good sign: The field hockey competitions will be staged this year at the the Yves-du-Manoir stadium, which was also used the last time Paris hosted the summer games — 100 years ago, in 1924.
Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
