Paris is transforming an industrial neighborhood into the Olympic Village—and then turning it into permanent housing

When thousands of athletes move into the Olympic Village on the outskirts of Paris next month, they’ll be staying in buildings that were ultimately designed for another use: to become part of a sustainable new neighborhood. It’s the opposite of what has happened in previous Olympics, when cities have tried to figure out what to do with relics of the Games as an afterthought.



“It’s not that we’re reusing things and transforming them into housing,” says architect and urban planner Anne Mie Depuydt, founder of the design firm UAPS , who served as the coordinating architect for one section of the Olympic Village. “It’s a new neighborhood, and we made sure that within the apartments and the office buildings we can adapt them to receive the athletes for the Olympics.”



[Photo: Filip Dujardin/courtesy UAPS]



In past Olympics, she says, the temporary housing built for athletes has been small, and has sometimes been reused as student housing. But the new neighborhood was designed to later have a normal mix of uses—rental housing, apartments for sale, social housing, student housing, offices, and a ground floor that will have cafes, shops, and other uses.



[Photo: Filip Dujardin/courtesy UAPS]



The area, a suburb next to the Seine River north of Paris, is a former industrial zone that needs good housing. “It’s a major intervention in a neighborhood that is quite poor, and where you have a lot of people who are unemployed,” Depuydt says. Nearby, an island called L’Île-Saint-Denis also built new permanent housing that will temporarily be part of the Olympic Village.



[Photo: Géraldine Millo/courtesy UAPS]



North of the Seine, two newly developed blocks now lead down to the river, reconnecting the neighborhood with the water. A new metro station will soon open, along with new bike paths. An area that will be used for buses during the Olympics is slated to become a park. At ground level in the new buildings, future retail space will temporarily be used for medical facilities for the athletes.



[Photo: Géraldine Millo/courtesy UAPS]



The planners simultaneously considered both the future use and the Olympics as they worked on the design. In the section that Depuydt worked on, for example, the architects knew that they needed to house 3,000 athletes, with two in each bedroom. That meant that in some apartments they had to add temporary walls to have another bedroom. In some cases, there are also temporary bathrooms. The apartment kitchens will be added later.



[Photo: Filip Dujardin/courtesy UAPS]



When the Olympics and then the Paralympics finish, and the last athletes move out of the Village in September, the buildings will need relatively minor changes, says Depuydt. The Olympic organizers will remove furniture, and the developers will take back the keys in November and start taking out temporary walls, installing kitchens, and getting each space ready for residents to move into next year.



[Photo: Filip Dujardin/courtesy UAPS]



The buildings are designed to be as sustainable as possible, with construction that produces 50% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than standard construction. The section led by UAPS, called Quinconce, uses wood rather than steel in smaller buildings, and low-carbon concrete in taller buildings. Low-carbon ceramic tiles are on the facade. The buildings will use little energy; instead of standard air-conditioning, they rely on geothermal heating and cooling and passive design strategies like thick insulation and carefully placed shading. The taller buildings have solar panels on the roof that will send power back into the grid.



[Photo: Géraldine Millo/courtesy UAPS]



Water from the buildings will be recycled into landscaping on the site. One experimental building, with permission to test technology that isn’t yet allowed under current regulations, will recycle shower water. When the toilets are flushed, the waste will be separated so it’s possible to make ammonia for fertilizer from the urine. A mini forest, with 200 trees, will grow next to the buildings. On rooftops, gardens are being planted to support migrating birds.



In the past, attempts to reuse Olympic infrastructure have often failed. “Unfortunately, the Olympics have an ignominious tradition of creating ‘white elephants,’ or stadiums and other venues that remain underused and expensive to maintain in the wake of the Games,” says political scientist Jules Boykoff. In some cases, organizers make promises to build social housing that fall through, he says. In Vancouver and London, “both projects ended up being essentially nationalized, paid for by taxpayers, and then promises around social housing mostly evaporated in the face of market exigencies,” he says.



It’s hard to predict what the ultimate fate will be of the new neighborhood in Paris—Boykoff argues that there’s a risk that the area will become gentrified and some previous residents will be displaced, even though the new housing includes affordable units. But it’s also possible that this might be the first time that the Olympics have actually helped a city’s development plan—accelerating new housing that was designed with the future in mind.