The Summer Olympic Games and then the Paralympic Games will take place in Paris from July. 41 competition venues, almost 15,000 athletes and countless TV viewers. The French capital has been preparing for this event for years and has implemented numerous construction projects. In our February issue, we take a critical look beyond the television screen and ask what impact the Games will have on the Parisian cityscape and urban space, what the mobility concepts for spectators will look like and what will actually happen to Olympic sports venues and facilities once the Games are over.
The 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be held in Paris. Cover image: Luca Dugaro via Unsplash
On the way to a walkable, bikeable and climate-friendly future
On Friday, July 26, 2024, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will not take place in a stadium for the first time in history. Instead, around 10,500 qualified athletes will cross the center of the French capital on the Seine in numerous boats. The opening ceremony will then conclude on a six-kilometer course in front of the world-famous Trocadéro – opposite the Eiffel Tower. The 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games will put their venue in the spotlight like no Olympic Games before.
To ensure that Paris can shine in the summer of 2024, the city has been working on an urban transformation process for years. Always at its center: Anne Hidalgo. For almost a decade, the mayor of Paris has been leading the city of 2.16 million into a walkable, bikeable and climate-friendly future. At the end of last year, the Urban Land Institute even honored Anne Hidalgo with the 2023 Visionary in Urban Development Award.
Everyone should be allowed to swim in the Seine again from 2025
However, it is currently anything but certain that the 2024 Summer Games will be another success for Anne Hidalgo. There have been and continue to be problems with the water quality of the Seine, in which the Olympians are to swim, and in November the mayor herself warned that the Paris metro would not be ready for the crowds that would attend the Olympics. Moreover, security concerns about hosting the Games are currently so great that thousands of police officers took to the streets across France against the organization as recently as mid-January.
The world, but also the planning disciplines, are therefore quite rightly looking to Paris this year with enormous anticipation, but also with great vigilance. In this issue, we therefore discuss the current state of urban development policy in the French capital, the city’s successes and failures in recent years, whether the Parisian traffic turnaround is really as exemplary as it is often portrayed in Germany and, above all, what future and what development steps await the city of 2.16 million inhabitants after 2024. The big announcement at the moment: a comprehensive climate plan and Parisians themselves will be allowed to swim in their Seine again from 2025. After 100 years of swimming bans and an investment of 1.4 billion euros in sewage treatment plants and sewers. Anne Hidalgo also wants to be the first to jump into the Seine herself this July. She announced this at a New Year’s reception.
The February issue is available here in the store.
In the January issue of G+L, we explore the question of whether and, if so, how deep Germany is in a construction crisis. Editor-in-chief Theresa Ramisch provides an insight into the issue in the editorial.