Houria looked out over the River Seine from her run-down social-housing building in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris. A few hundred metres from her subsiding block of flats, behind a secure fence, stood the glittering new buildings of the Olympic Village, which were completed last week and will now be furnished to accommodate more than 14,000 athletes for this year’s Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“It’s a showcase for our town and that’s important,” said Houria, 63, who had lived in the close-knit, working-class area all her life after her father, a welder, moved from Algeria in the 1960s. A former school support worker for children with special needs, Houria will make history when she is expected to be one of the first local residents to move into the Olympic Village a year after the games. The village will be transformed into homes for about 6,000 people, including a significant amount of social housing, as well as offices for 6,000 workers. The nearby crumbling local flats Houria has lived in for 50 years will be demolished and rebuilt.
“There’s a magnificent view of the river from here, the sunsets are beautiful,” she said. “Nature is so important, it’s a calm spot, and I’d love to keep growing apricots on my balcony.”
After months of rows over high ticket-prices for this summer’s Olympics, the focus is now shifting to the social legacy of the Games and their impact in transforming low-income communities of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris.
When the French capital secured the 2024 Olympic Games, after decades of failed bids, it was built on two promises. First, was a policy of regeneration in Seine-Saint-Denis, a départment north of Paris that remains one of the poorest in France, with a young, multi-ethnic population that suffers from discrimination and higher than average unemployment.
Second, after decades of overspending and waste in other Olympic host cities, Paris promised to scale down: it already had 95% of the sporting facilities in place and did not need to build a main stadium from scratch, unlike London for the 2012 Games. It would avoid any white elephant novelty structures, such as the ArcelorMittal Orbit metal tower in Stratford, championed by Boris Johnson when he was London mayor.
The Paris Games have a relatively modest budget by recent standards, at about €7bn (£6.1bn). Crucially, 80% of investment for the event has been focused on Seine-Saint-Denis and the two key construction projects – the Olympic Village and the aquatics centre – have been built there.
A major aim of the village is to reconcile the poorer northern outskirts of Paris with the River Seine. The city’s bold and controversial outdoor opening ceremony in July will include a flotilla of 160 boats carrying athletes along nearly four miles of the river. But the lasting change will be to permanently open up neglected stretches of the shores of the Seine in the northern suburbs. Once ignored and clogged with industry, these riverbanks are seen by local politicians as a key focus for new housing.
The Olympic Village, a 52-hectare (128-acre) site along the river’s edge, formerly made up of industrial buildings and warehouses, sits at the intersection of three banlieue towns: Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis and L’Île-Saint-Denis. It will include new and refurbished schools, new parks and already benefits from Greater Paris’s expanded transport system. Rather than create a new Olympic Village neighbourhood “from nothing”, the area was chosen because it was already a focus for renovation.
In his office at Saint-Ouen town hall, the Socialist mayor, Karim Bouamrane, points to a framed photograph of himself aged nine sitting near a run-down block with outside toilets and no bathrooms, where he grew up with his Moroccan parents, a builder and a homemaker. The building, long ago demolished, was located in the area of the Olympic Village site. “In this photo, I’m sitting waiting for my uncle, who had a car, to pick me up and take me to football, and I was annoyed because there was no public transport, it was always a struggle and I worried I’d be late,” Bouamrane said. “And I thought it’s a shame there’s no bus to take me, it’s a shame we’re so cut-off here. When I’m mayor, I’ll fix that.”
Saint-Ouen, a town of almost 60,000 people, is a dense, traditionally working-class area attracting significant development and new companies – including Elon Musk’s French Tesla headquarters and the future HQ of France’s domestic intelligence service, the DGSI. Bouamrane, and other leftwing local mayors, see the Games as accelerating existing regeneration plans and changing the image of the Parisian banlieue. Almost 70% of the population of his town is aged under 45.
“Historically, the banlieue meant the damned,” Bouamrane said. “This was a working-class area with a lot of factories after the second world war, but with the crises of the 1970s a lot of factories closed.” Towns like Saint-Ouen were later viewed as providing low-value services to the capital, he said. “But now, a new generation of mayors like me are saying: It’s over. We’re not here to manage Paris’s back office. We’re on the same level as Paris.”
Bouamrane said that at a time of economic difficulty and worry for many in French society, the Olympics and Paralympics could provide a “wave of hope”.
The key to this was “beauty”. The regeneration projects accelerated by the Olympics included new green spaces, improved school buildings, public services and opening up the riverside. Bouamrane said: “Too often, people – and even leftwing parties – used to think that beauty was only for the upper-classes. My view is that … coming from the working class, beauty is a weapon to give pride, identity and make people happy.”
Mathieu Hanotin, the Socialist mayor of neighbouring Saint-Denis, said creating lasting local jobs would be crucial. He said of the Olympic Village: “We didn’t build a neighbourhood out of nothing … we’ve amplified development and sped up what would have taken 20 years to do, but the idea was already there. There were already metro stations and the habits of daily life.”
Because of its position, new local residents would find it quicker to appropriate the area after the Games, Hanotin added.
Prof Isabelle Backouche, a historian and director of studies at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), said the Olympic and Paralympic Games were part of efforts to bridge the deep divide between the French capital and its poorer, bordering towns.
“Paris and its banlieue are two very different spaces, for a long time shut off from each other by fortifications,” she said. “Paris was enclosed behind a wall and moat until the end of the first world war, so the divide was very physical and obvious … There were few capitals at the start of the 20th century that were so cut off from their surroundings.”
Later in the 20th century, Backouche said, there was an arrogance and animosity between Paris, dominated by politicians on the right, and the surrounding north-eastern areas run by the left. The vast Grand Paris Express transport project to extend local trains aimed to change that, and counter the “inertia of history”. However, Backouche said the impact of new transport, as well as the Olympic Games, could only be assessed in years to come.
Marie Barsacq, the director of impact and legacy for the Paris Games’ organising committee, said the Olympics and Paralympics had shifted the focus away from building projects towards the impact on daily life. For low-income communities in Seine-Saint-Denis, where more than half of children entering secondary school are unable to swim, this meant renovating pools and providing swimming lessons. “It’s the first time there has been so little building for the Games,” Barsacq said. “The era of gigantism is over.”
