From The Economist, March 31:
ON THE SITE of a former piano factory in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, a 40-storey tower is being converted into a gleaming luxury hotel with a rooftop bar. A short walk away beside the river Seine, builders are finishing off a vast new “eco-neighbourhood” of flats, lined with saplings and lamp posts made from recycled scaffolding. These will briefly lodge some 10,500 athletes during the Paris Olympic games, which take place from July 26th-August 11th. Across the railway tracks, on land that formerly housed a gasworks, workers are putting the final touches to a brand-new aquatics centre, under a gently curved timber frame of French and Finnish pine.
These developments are part of an attempt by French urban planners to use the Olympics to revive Seine-Saint-Denis, a banlieue (suburb) that hugs the north and eastern edges of Paris. During the games many sporting events will take place in the historic city centre, including beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower. But some of the most prestigious, such as athletics at the Stade de France, will be held in Seine-Saint-Denis. More than this, the Olympics is part of a big rethink of greater Paris, and its transport system, which could in time radically change the capital’s geography.
Like many of Europe’s old cities, the historic centre of Paris, with its tree-lined avenues and cycle lanes, is fringed by poverty, high-rise blocks and contaminated former industrial land. Paris, delineated by its forbidding périphérique, a four-lane ring-road, is particularly cut off. In the capital’s cobbled centre, urban planners enthuse about the “15-minute city”, in which work, cafés, cinemas and bakeries are all but a short walk or cycle away. In the banlieues that ring Paris, the station alone often takes longer than that to reach—if there is one....
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