Plastic-bottle seats and wooden pools: can Paris deliver the leanest, greenest Olympics yet?

Paris’s Place de la Concorde is no stranger to scaffolding, as the site of more than 1,000 beheadings during the French Revolution. Two centuries on, the scaffold has returned. Teetering mountains of metal poles now fill the ceremonial square, forming a dozen gigantic tribunes – awaiting not executions but an extravaganza of urban sports . Where royal heads once rolled, athletes’ heads will soon be spinning, as the site gears up to host almost 40,000 spectators for the breakdancing, BMX and skateboarding competitions of this year’s Olympics.

It is one of the chief examples of how Paris hopes to host the leanest Games ever, using temporary staging to turn the city’s famous landmarks into photogenic backdrops for the televised spectacle – and leave as few new permanent structures as possible in its wake.

From next week, the Eiffel Tower will form an imposing background for beach volleyball and blind football, while the Palace of Versailles will provide a regal setting for dressage and showjumping. The opening ceremony will take place on the River Seine itself, seeing a flotilla cruise along a Unesco-listed stage. More than any other previous Olympics, this edition will see the Games cleverly mobilised as a fortnight-long advertisement for the host city.

But what will remain once the pageant is over? What gifts, beyond an increase in already swollen tourist numbers, can Paris hope to glean from the €9bn festivities?

“We saw the Olympics as a great opportunity to accelerate the city’s green transformation ,” says Emmanuel Grégoire, who served as Paris’s socialist deputy mayor for urban planning from 2014 until last week. “We have transformed public spaces, public transport, the river – without the Games, it could have taken a decade or two more.”

Paris is so very grey. We wanted to introduce different colours

He reels off an impressive list of stats: 250 miles of new bike lanes; the (ongoing) extension of the Métro network; the clean-up of the Seine ; the planting of 300,000 new trees. As a visitor, the changes are palpable. Arriving near the Olympic Village at the new Saint-Denis-Pleyel station , designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and crossing beneath the latticework dome of a huge new footbridge, is a thrill. Previously severed parts of the outskirts now feel connected to the city, while cycling around town on freshly minted bike lanes is a joy. Critics say this would all have happened anyway, as most plans predate the Olympics. But Grégoire insists the sporting steamroller acted as a supercharged catalyst. “It’s amazing how much the Games allowed us to act,” he says, “and bring more money to do these things quickly.” Just like the Covid pandemic, it created a national impetus to get things done – if sometimes a bit too quickly.

25 upgraded pools

Paris’s Olympic bid was proudly predicated on building very little. Having hosted the Games twice in the past, in 1900 and 1924, and the World Cup in 1998, which brought the huge Stade de France, the city already had most of what it needed. Rather than pump money into oversized new venues, which often struggle to fill seats and pay heating bills in “legacy” mode, Paris would spend most of its budget on upgrading what it already had. Accordingly, there is not much in the way of architectural spectacle – no steel-hungry Bird’s Nest stadium , or redundant ArcelorMittal Orbit – and, for this, local taxpayers should be thankful. In tune with the 2015 Paris agreement on climate, this is an Olympics of repair and reuse.

Across the city, ageing relics of the 1924 Olympiad have been given a new lease of life. The Yves-du-Manoir stadium, in the north-western suburb of Colombes, has a new 1,000-seat grandstand for the hockey contests, by Celnikier & Grabli Architectes , and will be left with dedicated pitches for hockey, football and rugby, as well as a new athletics track. The Georges Vallerey swimming pool in the eastern Télégraphe neighbourhood, to be used for Olympic training, has been bestowed with an elegant new retractable roof in the form of a slender latticed timber vault, by AIA Life Designers. It is one of 25 pools across the city that have been renovated for the Games. The dramatic 1970s parabolic concrete shell of the Grande Nef Lucien-Belloni, on the Île des Vannes near the Olympic Village, has been brought back from dereliction as a gymnastics training venue, by Chatillon Architectes , with the addition of thermally efficient polycarbonate walls. The same designers have also restored the 1900 Grand Palais , whose swirling cast-iron frame will form a glorious art nouveau backdrop to fencing and taekwondo. The spending of Olympic millions on sensitive upgrades to municipal facilities is hard to fault.

‘We said no to asphalt’

When it comes to the new buildings, the results are more mixed. The €138m Adidas Arena stands like a shimmering datacentre at the knotted intersection of the Périphérique ring road and the A1 highway at Porte de la Chapelle, on the northern edge of the city centre. Designed by NP2F and SCAU, it is a sleek addition to a neighbourhood once known for its “crack hill” of drug dealers, landing like a streamlined spaceship of urban renewal. It’s an intriguing thing, sharing a similarly knowing faux-industrial language to 6a’s MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The interior volumes protrude from a raised planted deck, joined by a jaunty wooden A-frame canopy, like a cluster of objects on a table top. A playful semicircular window looks out from the eastern facade, adorning the polished flank with a big smile. The 8,000-seat arena will host Olympic badminton and rhythmic gymnastics, then live on as a concert venue and home for the American-owned Paris Basketball club. Oddly, the official Paris 2024 website boasts that “most of the building materials will be bio-based (principally wood)”, yet the bunker-like edifice is made almost entirely of concrete and clad with energy-intensive aluminium. Did someone spill the bucket of greenwash?

Further north, the environmental claims stack up better. Sited across the roaring A1 from the Stade de France, and connected by a new pedestrian bridge (sadly closed off for the Games due to overcrowding fears), the €175m aquatics centre is a beacon of what this Olympics stands for: lean, green and a little understated. It will be a boon for an area with the lowest swimming proficiency in the country, where half of all 11-year-olds don’t know how to swim.

Crowned with the largest urban solar-energy farm in France, the building’s slender roof is a marvel. Inside, rows of great wooden beams droop above the pool, like spaghetti hung out to dry, held up by timber columns that lean outwards, giving a sense of tautness to the whole structure. The two shorter walls are entirely glazed, providing views out to the stadium in one direction, and to what will become a big park in the other, while the outside is wrapped with horizontal wooden fins, shading the interior. The 6,000 seats ( made of recycled plastic bottles , as in all the new venues) will be reduced by half after the Games, and replaced with a bouldering wall, padel tennis courts and five-a-side pitches, spilling out into the new park.

“It’s about doing better with less,” says Laure Mériaud of Ateliers 2/3/4, architects of the project with Dutch firm VenhoevenCS. “You can do something simple and efficient that is also beautiful and extraordinary.”

With the carbon footprint of heating and cooling foremost in mind, the architects reduced the volume as much as possible, squeezing the roof as low as sight-lines allowed. As the venue will only host water polo, artistic swimming and diving for the Games (the main swimming events will be held in a temporary pool in La Défense Arena), they decided there was no need for two separate pools for diving and swimming: a single 50-metre pool, with moving walls, could do both jobs. They also sensibly realised that the depth required for a one-metre-high diving board is considerably less than the 10-metre board, so the bottom of the diving pool has been sculpted accordingly – reducing the amount of water needed by 25%.

Such pragmatism informed every part of the design . For example, the brief asked for an enormous competition parking lot for coaches and trucks. “But there are swimming contests for just two weeks a year,” says Cécilia Gross of VenhoevenCS. “So we said no, we’ll make a reinforced grass leisure area for everyone to use, fitted with all the plugs and services for the trucks, but no asphalt.”

“It sounds easy,” adds Mériaud. “But at each stage of the design process, it was like a revolution.” Challenging the Olympic juggernaut – a process led by contractors, guided by speed and cost – is no easy task. During the Games, it will sadly be impossible to appreciate quite how transparent and light-flooded the building is: all the windows have been blacked out, in line with the draconian Olympic decree that natural light is forbidden inside venues. The cameras cope fine in the outdoor stadiums, so why not let the light in here and show off this low-carbon marvel?

Seashell pavements

The most contentious part of any Olympics is usually the athletes’ housing – and what happens to it afterwards . Paris is no exception. Located in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département in France, where the stadium and aquatics centre are also sited, the Olympic Village looks set to be another agent of fast-track gentrification. As in London, the formerly industrial riverside site was already earmarked for development, with real estate juggernaut Vinci Immobilier owning a substantial chunk of the land. But, unlike London, where a group of architects were hired to apply cosmetic dressings to standardised concrete apartment block “chassis” for a single developer, Lendlease, there is thankfully more variety here.

Linear urban blocks are arranged perpendicular to the Seine, imagined as rows of “docked boats”, ranging from four to 15 storeys, with courtyard blocks and little towers wrapped in a busy variety of costumes. Some 40 different architects, working for four developers, have selected everything from creamy render to ceramic tiles in pastel shades of pink, baby blue and pistachio, along with numerous different balcony types. It looks a bit like a Pinterest board of current cladding trends, but it’s a cheery change from the usual dour palette.

“Paris is so very grey,” says Dominique Perrault, the architect behind the masterplan . “We wanted to introduce different colours and materials, but not impose an extravagant vision.”

A sense of character is lent by the retention of some industrial buildings, including a 1930s power station, which was reborn as the Cité du Cinéma film studios in 2012 (co-opted as the athletes’ canteen), and another long brick building, which will become offices. There are some quirky details, like lamp-posts made from recycled scaffolding poles and benches cast using demolition waste, but it suffers from the usual symptoms of a developer-led place, planned at speed. The new streets feel too wide and ceremonial, the blocks overly regimented, the level changes negotiated with clumsy switchback ramps. Great claims were made for the flats not needing air conditioning; yet, on my visit, I found the lobbies piled high with portable AC units – 2,500 in all .

“We have to cater to the delegations that have requested air conditioning,” says Georgina Grenon, head of sustainability for the Paris Games. “But the apartments are cooled by a geothermal system [water pumped from deep below the ground] and the streets have been designed to draw air currents from the Seine, so we are confident AC won’t be needed in future.” She says the buildings’ hybrid construction, mixing timber and concrete, has reduced carbon emissions by 30%, while other novel features pepper the neighbourhood. A permeable pavement made of crushed seashells is designed to cool the street by allowing water stored below to evaporate on hot days. A flock of circular UFOs on poles turn out to be prototype urban air purifiers, designed to filter pollution from the nearby highway.

Related: ‘Era of gigantism is over’: why Paris chose banlieue for its Olympic Village

But it is an eco-vision reserved for the few. Only 30% of the flats will be affordable after the Games, with the rest sold for prices far beyond the reach of most locals – listed at around €7,500 per square metre, almost twice the local average.

“It follows a classic pattern,” says Justinien Tribillon, author of The Zone, an alternative history of Paris told through its suburbs. “The development is designed to ensure that people with more money will move here, increasing local tax revenues, instead of building very ambitious, progressive, sustainable social housing for the existing inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis.”

Perrault is conscious of the likely divide between life inside his model village, and out. “If we only consider inside the perimeter, I think it’s a terrible mistake,” he says. “Because then we are creating a ghetto for rich people. There must be a larger masterplan, connecting the village to the surroundings. If it’s isolated, it will be a disaster – but it requires political action.”

With its focus on mobility, greenery and renovation, the overarching legacy of the Paris Olympics looks set to be more promising than most, ultimately helping to stitch long-severed suburbs into the centre. The mental geography of most Parisians will expand, for the better. Perhaps that’s the most that could be hoped for: with its emphasis on speed and reliance on private developers, the Olympics can hardly be a vehicle for more equitable forms of development. It simply accelerates and amplifies existing patterns of regeneration and displacement. But if Paris had applied to housing the same progressive approach it has used to upgrade and expand its existing sports venues it could have had a socially and environmentally sustainable legacy to be truly proud of.

• The Olympic Games begin on 26 July