2024-02-29 12:46:21
The Olympic village for the Paris 2024 Games was inaugurated Thursday February 29 by Emmanuel Macron. THE “We kept the commitments we made in 2017 (…) You did it on time, on budget and with social and environmental exemplary standards”he added before attending the symbolic handing over of the keys to the village to the organizers of the Games.
Built straddling three municipalities of Seine-Saint-Denis (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine and L’Île-Saint-Denis), this set of buildings will be able to accommodate 14,500 athletes and members of delegations during the Olympics, then 9,000 during the Paralympics.
This truly new district must then accommodate 6,000 residents, a student residence, a hotel, two new school groups and 6,000 employees in offices. This reconversion scheme is classic for this type of equipment. But previous Olympic villages have not experienced the radiant future that the organizers of the Olympic Games had imagined.
► Grenoble 1968: abandoned buildings for sale
In 1968, for the Winter Games organized in Grenoble, eleven buildings of 4 or 5 floors, as well as eight towers, were built in the south of the city to house some of the athletes and house the premises of the organizing committee.
Enhanced with works of art, this program was then transformed, notably with a university residence integrated into a vast urban planning operation which would become the Villeneuve district, partly built in place of the dismantled Olympic stadium.
The whole thing is therefore intended to be very innovative. Today, La Villeneuve is one of the poorest districts of the Isère city and several buildings in the former Olympic village have been abandoned. State properties, they are currently the subject of a “transfer by call for tender” . “The buildings are in poor condition and walled up”specifies the announcement.
► Lake Placid 1980: prisoners instead of athletes
Facilities built to house participants in the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, a U.S. resort in New York state, have been transformed into a prison. While the prison administration was looking at the time for a place in the region to build a new prison, this reconversion was planned even before the Olympics.
The financing of these housing units by the American Congress was in fact conditional on their use. “secondary”. Despite a mobilization launched against this project, a correctional establishment opened its doors shortly after the Games.
► Sarajevo 1984: a village destroyed by war
Eight years after the organization of the Winter Games in Sarajevo in 1984, the former Olympic village, which had become a residential area, was destroyed in April 1992 during the war in Bosnia. The town was then besieged and bombarded from the surrounding hills by forces of the Army of the Bosnian Serb Republic.
The reconstruction of the site was undertaken by Barcelona, host city of the 1992 Summer Games, and was completed in 1999. “In honor of the Spanish city, frescoes were painted on the walls of the village, while the central square of the former Olympic village was renamed Barcelona Square”noted the website of the International Olympic Committee.
► Turin 2006 and RIo 2016, housing which did not find takers
Ten years apart, the villages of the Winter Games in Turin in 2006 and the Summer Games in Rio in 2016 did not experience the bright fate expected by real estate developers. The program launched in the capital of Piedmont ran into the financial crisis of 2008. Failing to find buyers, the accommodation was then occupied by migrants coming from Africa via Lampedusa.
In Rio, the Olympic Village was supposed to become an upscale residential complex in the Barra da Tijuca district. Thirty-one buildings were built to house nearly 18,000 people. But, here too, buyers did not rush into these luxury apartments.
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