In May, NOlympics LA joined anti-Olympics groups from around the world in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, France, for our second transnational anti-Olympics gathering. Paris is slated to host the next summer Games in 2024. Our hosts, Saccage 2024, are fighting to mitigate the harms of their city’s Olympics while strengthening the broader movement against the Olympics everywhere! Here are some highlights of what we saw and learned on our visit:
Garden Tour in Aubervilliers
We had a chance to tour the Jardins Ouvriers d’Aubervilliers (the Aubervilliers Workers Gardens), where construction has broken ground despite the efforts of occupiers to stop the building of an Olympic training pool. We were led on a tour by one of the gardeners, Marie.
Development of the area
Starting in the early 20th century, industrialization brought workers to live in the Fort d’Aubervilliers area. The government at the time believed workers should have access to spaces for cultivating the food they needed, and an association of gardeners was formally established on November 24, 1935. Today, the area is a working-class neighborhood. However, a new luxury housing “eco-village” is being built right next to the gardens, alongs with expansions to an existing metro station to accommodate a new line. The Olympic training pool is the wedge needed to clear space to connect the metro expansion with the new apartments. The new metro line (Line 15) will connect the area to the west of Paris, allowing new residents to live in (relatively) cheap apartments in Aubervilliers but still easily commute to La Defense (the business district) in just 15 minutes. Developing an “eco-village” in this area sends a clear message: developers and the government want to bring a wealthier population to the area.
It’s a common theme we’ve seen at almost every Olympics: developers take advantage of Olympic construction to make way for projects they have wanted to build for years.
Walking around the garden and observing the neighborhood, the plan to build an “eco-village” feels obviously out of place. Most of the apartment buildings on the perimeter of the gardens are older public housing buildings. There is also a parking lot in front of the “eco-village” construction site where people run a car repair business. Broken cars and car parts litter the side of the street. Knowing the pattern of destruction luxury apartments like the “eco-village” bring, tied to exclusive ideas about who and what belongs (and doesn’t belong) in newly developed spaces, we can expect to see the car repair business shut down once the new housing development opens.
The garden and the Olympic training pool
In 2019, the regional government changed a law that previously forbade building over popular gardens. A group called Jardins à Defendre (JAD) formed to protest the plan to demolish some of the gardens for an Olympic training pool and solarium. They occupied the garden in the months leading up to the pool’s construction, from April to September 2021. Eventually, a large police force arrived at the gardens to evict them. Within the first two hours after the eviction of occupiers, bulldozers and other heavy machinery destroyed 18 plots. Gardeners whose plots were targeted during the eviction were given new plots in a nearby park, or larger plots in the Aubervilliers gardens were split to accommodate the displaced.
After the first 18 plots were destroyed, a court ruled that no further demolition of the gardens was allowed. While that court ruling promises to protect the remaining garden area, the JAD organizers are still worried because it could be undone by a future court decision. There is still no permanent solution to protect the gardens from developers. In response to the court ruling, the developers agreed only to build the pool and a private garden, and not the planned solarium. Why might a private garden be needed next to an already established garden? The use is still unknown, but some of the worker-gardeners speculate it may be for the private use of the residents of the “eco-village.”
During the tour
We were met with a white metal wall separating the lush green of vegetables and multicolored array of flowers from the brown dust of the construction site. Dust from the construction site has polluted the gardens, and white spots cover nearby leaves. Before the eviction, developers promised to replant the 45 fruit trees destroyed by the construction. In true Olympic fashion, these trees haven’t been replanted. Marie told us that one of the lost trees was 35 years old.
During the tour, we had a chance to experience the beauty and serenity of the gardens. At least twenty-six species of birds call the gardens their home, and local hedgehogs take residence in the pits and grocery shop in the vegetable plots. We were offered delicious fruits and vegetables to snack on and spices and flowers to smell throughout the tour. Marie shared that many gardeners plant crops native to their home countries. But, no matter where we walked or how many beautiful plants grew, we were always reminded of the destruction.
How could anyone justify the destruction of a unique and historical green space for just sixteen days of Olympic competition?
The Athletes Village
We had a chance to take an informal tour of the Athletes Village neighborhood under construction in Seine-Saint-Denis, led by members of Saccage 2024. In the Athletes Village area, other projects underway include a freeway on-ramp, which will be built next to an elementary school, and a new train station that is part of the “Grand Paris Express” transit expansion project.
The Athletes Village is massive to say the least. Even on paper, project renderings illustrate an enormous redesign of the area to accommodate the Games. 19 businesses, three schools, a hotel, a student residence, and a migrant workers’ hostel were targeted for demolition to make space for the Athletes Village. While there are signs pledging a more sustainable future for the area, the development came at the cost of the displacement of some 300 migrant workers, including some who had lived there for forty years. Construction started in the fall of 2019 and is expected to continue for three to four years. Adding insult to injury, pandemic lockdowns have affected building schedules and the construction site received special permission to work on the weekends. Local residents’ lives are being disrupted by the constant sounds of drills and sledgehammers. After the Games, the Village will become housing and will include some ‘affordable’ units (although as always, a key question here is ‘affordable for who?’). We learned that the government expects there to be a surplus of houses to sell, so the Ministry of the Interior will have to buy some of the units. Just as we see in London, Athletes Villages provide a convenient opportunity for the government to wipe out and change neighborhoods to bring wealthier residents. There is no justification for evicting and harming long-time communities just for sixteen days of sports competition.
The Pleyel Highway On-Ramp
Another development project near the Athletes Village is the creation of a highway on-ramp. As you can see from the Paris 2024 Games map, athletes staying in the Village will need to travel some distance to reach each sport’s event location. Heavy traffic is expected around the area to reach the highway. Although the freeway already has an on-ramp, the IOC was worried that the existing one would not be able to handle the traffic and demanded another (unnecessary) on-ramp to be built. Both on-ramps will be in use during the Games, and the older one will be demolished afterwards. Most disturbingly, the location of the new on-ramp is right on the doorstep of the playground of École Anatole France, an elementary school. The day we visited you could hear the sound of kids running and playing during recess. It’s a known fact that spending extended periods of time near a freeway has negative health implications. Car and truck pollution is known to be tied to asthma and reduced lung capacity, contributing to cancer, heart attacks, and strokes. To put these school children in direct harm’s way is not justifiable. This school serves a working-class, majority black and brown neighborhood, meaning that — as in so many other places around the world — it is low-income racialized communities who are most exposed to the negative health risks associated with pollution. During the anti-Olympics gathering, one parent from École Anatole France shared his efforts to persuade lawmakers to stop the construction of the on-ramp. He shared his concerns about the pollution his children would be exposed to and argued that the on-ramp will trap students inside a web of large roads that pose a safety concern to children on their way to and from school.
Surrounding the school is a residential area and residents are speaking up as well. One house next to the on-ramp construction site has signs educating passersby of the negative implications of the on-ramp. Like the neighbors of the Olympics venues in Inglewood, LA, who are exposed to high air pollution levels from flight paths and intersecting freeways, neighbors of Paris 2024’s Athletes Village in Saint-Denis are exposed to pollution levels that wealthier city residents don’t have to tolerate.
Every Olympic Games is the same story but in a new location. We must stop the IOC from continuing to bring their toxic Games to cities around the world.
Toxic tour
A group of over 50 participants in the transnational anti-Olympics gathering were led on a “toxic tour” of l’Aire des Vents park and Georges Valbon Park, where the Paris 2024 Media Village is being builtlocated, and Georges Valbon Park. The tour exposed us to the toxic nature of the negative environmental impacts of the Games.
Georges Valbon Park, also known as Parc de la Courneuve, is a Natura 2000 classified green space in a highly urbanized area outside of Paris. Natura 2000 is a network of parks across 27 EU countries that are designated for protecting Europe’s valuable and threatened species and natural habitats. The neighboring l’Aire des Vents park makes up part of the same ecological corridor, andAlthough the park is environmentally protected, the construction of the Media Village there threatens the established habitat and ecosystem. (At the time of our visit, Paris 2024 planned to build a shooting range in the Georges Valbon Parkpark too, further endangering local species. Fortunately, that plan has since been scrapped.)
The Olympic Games will cause irreversible damage to the ecological corridornature preserve. Walking up to the site of the Media Village, we were met with towering cranes and dirt. Gare de Dugny La Courneuve is another part of the park tied tothat has been subjected to environmental controversydestruction. This train station is a part of the Grand Paris Express transit expansion project. This extensive transport network claims to create new connections between different parts of the surrounding area of Paris to promote economic dynamism. When the train station opened, a large protest drew attention to how its opening was related to both ecological and social struggles. The groundwater near the train station was polluted before station construction began. According to our guide, the rush to build the station meant there was not enough time to de-pollute the area properly. Moreover, the government claimed the depollution that is taking place would compensate for the destruction caused by the media village, but the math simply does not add up: the media village is destroying 27 acres of parkland, while the depollution project claims to be cleaning up 13 acres. The construction firm behind the Grand Paris project, Vinci, has promised to fully depollute the area in the future, but we’re not holding our breath.
Before the Olympic plan was created, the land in the parks was considered “unconstructable,” meaning that it was illegal to build on the land because of high winds and the Natura 2000 classification. The Olympics served as an excuse to override these restrictions. Once the location of the Media Village was decided, the land was purchased under market value. It is important to note that the IOC did not want or need this media village. This was a project pushed by the mayor. The Media Village expects to host around 2,000 journalists. We learned that many journalists have said that they will not stay in the Media Village because it is so far and isolated from most of the Olympics events. The Media Village represents another example of how the Olympics are used as a tool to accelerate development projects that political and business elites want to advance.
