Two top French ministers joined forces 20 kilometres to the north of Paris on Monday to pay tribute to the builders, engineers and landscapers behind a 650-million euro regeneration project on 70 hectares of land around the venue for the sports climbing events during the Paris Olympic Games.
During their 90-minute tour of the Cluster des Medias, sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra and industry minister Roland Lescure inaugurated the 10-million euro Gymnase Marie Paradis in Le Bourget where competitors will warm up for their appearances between 5 and 10 August in the climbing events on the walls outside.
The delegation - which included politicians from the Seine-Saint-Denis region as well as Tony Estanguet, the boss of the Paris Olympics organizing committee - also inspected a new footbridge over the A1 motorway leading to apartment blocks in the Village des Medias in Dugny where more than 1,500 foreign technical staff and journalists will stay during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
"What you have done is absolutely exemplary," Oudéa-Castéra told the 200-odd workers who had gathered inside the gymnasium which will be used for sports such as badminton, handball and volleyball as well as sport climbing after the Games.
Flanked by Lescure, she added: "You've worked very hard over the years and you've delivered a whole complex on time and a whole extraordinary area that will enable us to be extremely proud to welcome people from all over the world from next week.
Praise
"It shows just how much France is a nation of builders," she added. "It just shows how much it has with men and women who are absolutely exceptional and who really do our country proud.
"You really have to realise that this is a first in the history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games that structures of this scale and magnitude are being delivered in such reliable conditions, on time and on budget.
"It's not me saying it. It's the International OIympic Committee saying these things when they come to visit us in France. I think we can all be extremely proud."
Planning chiefs in Seine Saint Denis have been working since the turn of the century on projects to offer residents in Dugny and La Comète - a tiny district of the town cut off by the A1 Motorway – with better and more eco-friendly links to the public transport networks.
“Dugny was totally bombed and razed to the ground during the Second World War,” said Isabelle Vallentin, deputy managing director at SOLIDEO – the body charged with making sure Olympic venues are completed on time.
“It was rebuilt after the war and as it was the 1940s and 50s, things were orientated in this town towards the car. Today, of course, the thinking is different.
Distance
“Even the bus network wasn't linked to the stations. So there's been a lot of thinking going on about how to pull the town together and how to ensure that you can get from the town to the station in a pleasant way and with a sense of continuity.”
The footbridge over the motorway will connect the Gymnase Marie Paradis and the surrounding school and sports facilities with just over a dozen apartment blocks in Dugny some of which boast sweeping views into central Paris as well as over the 400-hectare Parc Georges Valbron which stretches into La Courneuve.
“When we designed the project for the apartments in the spring of 2020 we were in the middle of the lockdown for the coronavirus,” said Jean-Francois Leopold, deputy director at Demathieu Bard Immobilier.
Leopold, whose company worked with Sogeprom on eight of the blocks, added: “I think that, consciously or unconsciously, the fact that everyone was confined led the project to anticipate everything that makes people think about the quality of housing and the quality of life that they wanted post Covid.”
Change
Residents who move into the 1,400 new homes after the Paralympic Games on 8 September will also benefit from a revamp of the 20-hectare Aire des Vents.
The space was used for just over two decades as the venue for the Fête de l'Humanité music and cultural rally as well as a car park for the biennial Paris Air Show at Le Bourget International Air and Space Show.
Landscapers will repurpose the area over the next 18 months into a separate open space from the nearby Parc Georges Valbon which will gain another 13 hectares from the end of 2024 after the clean-up of the former military oil and gas storage centre – Terrain des Essences – is completed.
"I've been working on this project for 10 years," said Quentin Gesell, the mayor of Dugny, after the SOLIDEO chief Nicolas Ferrand had handed over a symbolic key to the Cluster des Medias to Estanguet.
"It's a relief and it's even more beautiful than it looked in the pictures," he beamed.
"There have been a lot of meetings, a lot of work, a lot of discussions, sometimes not always straightforward but now it's come to fruition.
"After the foreign media have gone, the residents will simply be able to enjoy it to the full."
