Work on the Olympic and Paralympic village is well underway for Paris 2024. It will be located in Seine-Saint-Denis. The organization also relied on the opinions of the athletes to build a village that met their expectations as closely as possible.
Being able to cycle or scooter in the village, not having to walk too much to eat, fluidity within the self-service, places to have fun, places to be quiet … this is the type of requests that emerge most often.
Above all, when the athletes are together, the two worlds, Olympic and Paralympic, must be present. In Rio for example, to go faster to the self service, we took a shortcut that required going down three steps and over a small bridge. Obviously, for a person in a wheelchair this passage is not at all suitable.
To take the best way to build this village in Paris, you have to think of everything. The village will rest on 52 hectares, that is to say 70 football fields or 2,600 tennis courts or, for the more adept, 18,000 fencing tracks.
The village is located in three municipalities: Île Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and Saint-Denis. Today, 400 trucks and dozens of cranes are already busy in the field. The “to do list” is immense for the workers: build a bus station, create apartments for 14,420 beds, develop a three-hectare park, and transform the large nave of the cinema city into a restaurant, capable of serving 60,000 meals per day…
The end of the work is scheduled for the end of the 4th quarter of 2023. In the event of a delay in the completion of the work, it will be difficult to get athletes from all over the world to sleep outside. Even if in Rio, when we arrived in the village, we did not yet have hot water, nor completely finished toilets, but I was so happy to be selected, and present at the heart of this boiling, that a simple mattress would have largely made me happy.
But obviously the delay here is not an option. The little mattress ahead of the timing of the work has already melted because of the health crisis.
For the sake of heritage, this village is first thought for 2025 and the future inhabitants. In Tokyo, it was the same. The partitions were very thin. We could tell that in a few mass shots, a studio would very quickly turn into a large apartment.
The future inhabitants of this village should be able to settle in 2025. Moreover, from October 1, a plot of the village should already be available to developers.