The game is over, nothing is going well

What seems like a good idea sometimes turns out to be a serious mistake, especially when it comes to the future of a big city like Paris. There ” hatred of the city » would it hide under good intentions, with bad ideas? What lessons will we learn from these mistakes when the urban issue is so important?

One hundred years after the 1924 Olympic Games, Paris once again hosts this magnificent event and, for the occasion, “ everything has been done to give the most beautiful image of the capital “. The previous sporting event had enriched us with the Georges Vallerey swimming pool in the 20th arrondissement, the Georges du Manoir stadium in Colombes, the Roland-Garros complex and many other improvements. It doesn’t seem like the current path ” embellishments » be taken into account. Most of the feelings seem to focus on the congestion which makes the city impassable on a daily basis and organized confinement, of a new type. The widely shared feeling is that of contempt “ of urbanity », people who live, work and still love their city every day!

What is really at stake is the future of the city
What makes Paris the most beautiful city in the world?
What was specific to our cities, their wealth, their diversity will disappear, we are in the process of trivializing everything, standardizing, relativizing, making ordinary.
Paris was distinguished by both its unity and its diversity, its density, its avenues, its monuments, its small squares, its terraces, its street trees, its fountains… The list can go on indefinitely. It’s a complex alchemy. Paris is a thousand places of life, changes of scale, monuments and surprises on every street corner. The city lives, it becomes more beautiful, it can also become ugly, but debate quickly becomes impossible when it comes to talking “ beauty “.

One thing is certain, the city is not a playground
Unless we consider it as the latest avatar of Disney, in which case it becomes an ersatz city. This is perhaps the path that has currently been taken, without the project having been clearly stated, in which case the situation is even more serious!
The bad idea is to distort our heritage, to make Paris unlivable, by destroying most of what makes it great.
The Paris of the Olympic Games is cluttered with monumental stands, ephemeral buildings, each more ordinary than the other: banality rages…
We were waiting for a surprise, we got it!

The trivialization is surprising
Alongside the Olympics construction site, schoolyards now resemble the developments proposed in the city space, same plantations, same materials. The difference between the inside and the outside has disappeared, there is no longer this demarcation which protected the school space from the public space. Schoolyards are open to associations, gymnasiums are converted into training rooms, in each place we multiply the uses: it is the “ chronotopia » ! This new concept takes into account the temporalities of use in the planning of the city, it wants to make the city more efficient but will at the same time contribute to its disappearance by making the city neutral and uniform, by erasing the differences.

Accomplished Paris, magnificent Paris, ecological Paris… Paris battered
Proposing the candidacy of Paris was a good idea, that of promoting the image of France. Major Parisian events, such as the universal exhibitions, have always left their mark: the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais, the Palais de Tokyo, the Trocadéro and its esplanade, the Porte Dorée museum and many others.
Today, no innovation, no daring but the fear of leaving a mark, the fear of expressing a certain pride. One hundred years later, Paris 2024 gives a foretaste of its ambition “ Popular games more open than ever “. Everything is said: Visitors will just have to contemplate the daily life of Parisians so as not to have to envy them.
The most shocking thing today is what is happening before our eyes and which does not seem to offend anyone! The deterioration of the image of Paris is at stake.
This magnificent city is a little more distorted, mutilated, deteriorated every day and obviously this does not matter.
The Olympic Games, like major universal exhibitions, are generally an opportunity to discover the culture and beauty of a place but not to make them disappear. What is at stake today is not to highlight our Capital but to destroy its true greatness.

What landscape will be offered to visitors?
From the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Esplanade des Invalides, the Champs de Mars, the Esplanade du Trocadéro, the quays, the bridges… nothing has been spared. Instead of discovering our wonders, tourists will come across places cluttered with removable stands. This will inevitably result in a degraded image, the city is in ruins!
Phew! They forgot, or spared, Place Fürstenberg, the Sainte-Catherine market square.

What could have been done so that everything the territory ” takes advantage !
It was accepting a simple idea, making the ring road an Olympic ring! A ring of sport, of ecology, a link, a magnificent promenade, the boulevard of the 21st century. The driving force behind an Île-de-France region which has finally understood that there is not Paris on one side and the rest on the other!

That the center of Paris, the historic center, should be definitively dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists seems inevitable and in keeping with history. However, it seems absurd to turn it into a playground. It must be admitted that “ the center of historic towns slows down “, it is absurd to make it the place of “ faster, higher, stronger “. We must give him the calm he aspires to and understand that the motto of the games applies outside, I mean on the peripheral.

The good idea would have been to make the banks of the ring road united between inner Paris and the neighboring municipalities; it was an opportunity to use and modernize the equipment located on the edge of the ring road and to design only the essential equipment.

The opportunity was unique to create footbridges, direct passages between the two banks of the ring road and to use all the existing facilities on the edges of the ring road: the Stade de France, the new nautical center, the Arena, the Zénith de la Villette, Roland-Garos, Jean Bouin, Charlety, the Georges Carpentier sports center, the Pelé stadium, the Cardinal Lavigerie sports fields, the Alain Mimoun sports center, Maccabi, Paris Métropole, the Maryse Hilsz sports center… Dozens of sports sites, on a human scale, which just need to be refreshed, enlarged, modernized. Due to the renovation of all of this equipment, demonstrations could have taken place around the ring road, instead of spending several hundred million on ephemeral constructions, making our monuments completely invisible.

The ring road would have retained its connecting function (the reduction in speed on this ring also goes in the direction of history). Furthermore, by multiplying the means of collective transport, by densifying its surroundings, by bringing together its banks, the project would have limited the traffic jams caused by the demonstration. It was enough to offer a shuttle service running permanently on the ring road, doubling the trams and connecting all the sites together. It was also the opportunity to design the fifty thousand parking spaces essential to complete the city’s policy. But above all the games of the century would have left a trace of its time, another landscape for the city.

Sometimes it’s so hard to have an idea that you forget that it could be bad!
“ The old world » was that of concentration and positioning everything in the center, the new world is organized differently, it makes the periphery the expression of an expansion of space, linked in particular to means of collective transport.
If creating this moment of international sharing in France was a good idea, it was also the moment to reconcile Parisians and the periphery. The question today is: “ What will remain of this event? » apart from the inconveniences borne by Parisians, the periphery and visitors… who will not see a positive mark, a magnificent imprint of this event.

Paris and its outskirts are unloved, mistreated
The city is the subject of distrust, sometimes even of hatred that is difficult to understand. So everything is focused on revegetation, a cover-up which will surely have a saving effect for those who do not know the history and do not have an idea of ​​what a city could be like today. We must not despise either history or culture which are insurance for the conduct of a project.
Fleeing the city has been a leitmotif, an important response after confinement but many are returning to it.
Without the city, democracy is difficult to imagine.
A big parade on the Seine, why not!
THE ” common good » is a precious asset, it has been transformed into public and private facilities, without links between them. The space of the city brings us together and allows democracy to share a support, to create a social bond, a community. The city must once again become an object of knowledge and innovation, it is still necessary to have a prior and clear representation.
I love Paris and cities but I also love sport!

Alain Sarfati
Urbanist architect

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