Paris 2024 Olympics: Inside the landmark Olympic Village

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Saint-Denis, France
CNN
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When Paris last hosted the Summer Olympics 100 years ago, organisers were so keen to bring athletes together under the same roof that they built the first-ever Olympic Village.

It consisted of a modest, furnished wooden hut that was soon demolished.

A century later, the Olympic Games are returning to the City of Light, but French officials are doing something very different this time: As part of their efforts to make Paris 2024 “the most responsible and sustainable Olympic Games in history,” they're creating something lasting.

“The village was conceived as a neighbourhood, a neighbourhood that will live on,” said Georgina Glennon, sustainability director for Paris 2024. “Paris 2024 will rent the village for a few months.”

Athletes staying in the Olympic Village this summer will not be housed in apartments built specifically for them, but will instead live in other people's homes and workplaces.

Once the Paralympics finish on September 8, the village of 82 buildings will be converted into office space for 6,000 workers and apartments for another 6,000 people.

The hope is that the project can serve as a model to ease the housing crisis in the French capital, where rising interest rates, skyrocketing prices and limited supply have made it harder than ever to buy or rent a home. Demand for affordable housing is so high that when a tiny 10-square-meter (108-square-foot) apartment in Paris' up-and-coming 10th arrondissement hit the rental market last year for 610 euros ($614) a month, it attracted 765 applicants within a week.

The site for the Olympic Village was chosen in hopes of revitalizing part of the city's historically poor northern suburbs. The village sits at the crossroads of three suburbs: Saint-Denis, a diverse working-class neighborhood long plagued by crime and insecurity; the rapidly gentrifying Saint-Ouen; and Île de Saint-Denis, an island in the Seine. Organizers have said that after the Games are over, 32 percent of the new homes built for the Olympics in Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen, and 48 percent of the homes on Saint-Denis, will be set aside as social housing.

But there is a risk that current residents will be forced out by rising rents. Similar promises to build affordable housing in East London were made before the 2012 Olympics, but they ultimately fell largely flat. A BBC report in 2022 found that of the 9,000 homes built within the Olympic Park, fewer than 200 were offered at the lowest rents.

As with the Olympics themselves (which organizers say will run on 100% renewable energy), everything built for the Athletes' Village was done with sustainability in mind. To minimize the amount of construction, organizers temporarily or permanently adapted several of the existing buildings on the site, including an old electrical factory that was converted into a “residential center”. They also rented an existing film studio in the area to use as a training facility for the athletes, rather than building new training facilities, as has been done for several other Olympics.

The resulting building will be constructed from wood and recycled materials, using a process that Glenon says has reduced the project's carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent per square meter, more than what is required by French environmental regulations.

Glenon said a third of the rooftops will be fitted with solar panels, and the other third will have gardens to help cool the interiors. There will also be long, straight openings between the buildings that open onto the Seine, creating a wind tunnel to carry fresh river air as far inland as possible. This summer is expected to be hotter than usual, according to the French weather service, and there are concerns that the heat could pose a safety risk to the athletes.

But it's not just the structures themselves that are recycled.

The Athletes' Village will have around 3,000 apartments with a total of 14,250 beds made from recyclable materials similar to those used in Tokyo. The mattresses are made from recycled materials and can be turned over to adjust firmness. The stools are made from cardboard, making them easily recyclable after the Olympics.

Throughout the village, organizers are conducting several experiments to see whether new green technologies and construction methods are viable in the real world.

“This is a giant testing room,” Glennon said.

One of the walkways is made from seashells, which in theory should absorb rain and, on hot days, the stored water should evaporate and help keep passersby cool.

Five experimental outdoor air purifiers have been installed on the village's main street. The huge, UFO-like towers are designed like vacuum cleaners, sucking in polluted air and filtering out dangerous particles. The devices “can remove 95 percent of particulate matter of all sizes from the air,” creator Jerome Giacomoni told CNN. Giacomoni said the five units can purify the equivalent of 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools' worth of air per hour, using negligible electricity.

Perhaps the innovation that will receive the most scrutiny is the geothermal cooling system, as athletes in Paris face the same scorching heat and humidity as they did three years ago at the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

“Climate change must increasingly be seen as an existential threat to sport,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said in a report published last week (18 June) examining the heat risks associated with this summer's Olympics.

Some of the buildings in the Olympic Village will have conventional air conditioning on the first floors as they will be converted into shops after the Olympics, but the athletes' apartments will use geothermal cooling instead of air conditioning.

The system would take water cooled to 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit) from a 70-metre (230-foot) deep well at a nearby geothermal power plant and send it through pipes under the floors of each apartment. According to Laurent Michaud, director of the Athletes' Village for the Paris 2024 Games, the chilled water could cool the buildings by 6 to 10 degrees Celsius compared to the outside temperature. The system would be controlled at the building level, but each apartment would have a thermostat that could turn the temperature up or down by 2 degrees. The system would also help heat the apartments in winter.

The man-made climate crisis is making heatwaves more frequent, intense and earlier in the year around the world, with Paris particularly vulnerable: residents of the French capital are more likely to die from extreme heat than any other European city, according to a study of more than 850 cities.

According to the latest data from the International Energy Agency, as of 2022, only 19% of all European households will have air conditioning. But extreme heat across much of the world is driving up global demand for air conditioning, creating a climate dilemma: Air conditioning systems use large amounts of energy, much of which still comes from fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide and warm the planet.

For delegates concerned about the system's effectiveness during heat waves, the village will offer the option of renting individual air conditioning units.

Asked by Reuters in March about the village's lack of air conditioning, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the village was “designed in such a way that it does not need air conditioning, even at very high temperatures.”

“We are on the brink of a crisis and everyone must be aware of this, including the athletes,” Hidalgo said. “We must trust the scientists who will help us to construct the buildings in a calm way that will allow us to manage without air conditioning.”

CNN's Saskia Van Doorn and Derek Van Dam contributed to this report.