ON THE SITE of a former piano factory in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, a 40-storey tower is being converted into a gleaming luxury hotel with a rooftop bar. A short walk away beside the river Seine, builders are finishing off a vast new “eco-neighbourhood” of flats, lined with saplings and lamp posts made from recycled scaffolding. These will briefly lodge some 10,500 athletes during the Paris Olympic games, which take place from July 26th-August 11th. Across the railway tracks, on land that formerly housed a gasworks, workers are putting the final touches to a brand-new aquatics centre, under a gently curved timber frame of French and Finnish pine.

These developments are part of an attempt by French urban planners to use the Olympics to revive Seine-Saint-Denis, a banlieue (suburb) that hugs the north and eastern edges of Paris. During the games many sporting events will take place in the historic city centre, including beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower. But some of the most prestigious, such as athletics at the Stade de France, will be held in Seine-Saint-Denis. More than this, the Olympics is part of a big rethink of greater Paris, and its transport system, which could in time radically change the capital’s geography.

Like many of Europe’s old cities, the historic centre of Paris, with its tree-lined avenues and cycle lanes, is fringed by poverty, high-rise blocks and contaminated former industrial land. Paris, delineated by its forbidding périphérique, a four-lane ring-road, is particularly cut off. In the capital’s cobbled centre, urban planners enthuse about the “15-minute city”, in which work, cafés, cinemas and bakeries are all but a short walk or cycle away. In the banlieues that ring Paris, the station alone often takes longer than that to reach—if there is one.

Fully 1.7m people of different tongues and faiths crowd into Seine-Saint-Denis, where tower blocks were built in the 1960s and 1970s partly to house industrial workers recruited in North Africa, and their families. Its poverty rate is 28%, nearly twice that in Paris. Almost a quarter of the families there are headed by a single parent. At the age of ten, says Quentin Gesell of the Métropole du Grand Paris, a regional administrative body, half the children in Seine-Saint-Denis today do not know how to swim.

The various greater Paris authorities now hope that the Olympics can help turn this area’s fortunes around, and shift the perception of the capital’s northern periphery. The sheer scale of investment, much of which is behind schedule and will not be ready until the end of the decade, is eye-watering. Under a plan first hatched in 2007, tunnels are still being dug to create a giant loop of 200km of new driverless Metro lines and 68 new stations, known as the Grand Paris Express. When finished, it will double the existing Paris Metro network. Crucially, instead of carrying people from the banlieues only in and out of the centre, it will also link the outskirts to each other and to the city’s airports, all at a cost of some €42bn ($45bn).

The idea, says Marie Barsacq, in charge of legacy-planning for the Olympics, is that the games leave behind facilities and transport for the area, as well as creating jobs and boosting skills. Seine-Saint-Denis, which currently has the fewest swimming pools per head in France, will be bequeathed not just the new aquatics centre but over a dozen new or renovated public pools. The staff needed to prepare and serve 13m meals to the athletes’ village are all being recruited locally. In an area of high youth unemployment, the hope is that these short-term jobs will offer a path to more stable employment.

Karim Bouamrane, the Socialist mayor of Saint-Ouen, sees the Olympics as an accelerator for reviving the area. Projects already underway have been given a boost; sporting facilities a facelift. He identifies the new transport links, which will make Saint-Ouen one of the best connected hubs in the Paris banlieue, as crucial. Elon Musk’s Tesla, an electric-car manufacturer, has picked Saint-Ouen for its new French headquarters. Tony Parker, a French-American former professional basketball player, is opening a new sports academy there. “Before, when you used to come to Saint-Ouen it was because you had no choice,” says Mr Bouamrane: “now it’s a choice.”

The lesson from other European cities that have tried similar projects, including London’s Stratford or Hamburg’s HafenCity, is that new transport links and infrastructure can indeed help to revive once-neglected neighbourhoods and lure private developers. But it takes time, and huge upfront public investment. Post-covid, developments that rely on office space are particularly fragile. Extravagant ill-adapted vanity projects can leave a pile of debt and little else. France certainly loves its grands projets. But Paris has studiously avoided building many new sports facilities, and focused events mostly on existing ones, in order to avoid the fate of other host cities such as Athens. There, the stadiums at Hellinikon were left abandoned for years afterwards.

For places like Saint-Ouen, which lie just beyond the ring-road, the chances of such investment paying off are probably greater than for those on the outer periphery. Yet even so the challenge of bridging the divide between Paris and its banlieues is daunting. Advanced sales of the flats at the athletes’ village have not gone as well as expected. Many Parisians seldom, if ever, venture to the outskirts. Locals feel that their address, and the département code 93, stigmatises them. “We really struggle with the 93,” says a woman outside the boulangerie in Saint-Ouen; “As soon as you mention 93, it’s no good.” Mr Bouamrane, the mayor, points out that “etymologically the word banlieue means the ‘place of the banished’. It’s the place where we don’t like you.”

Across from the nearly-finished Metro station at Saint-Denis Pleyel a teenage girl sitting with her friends on a street bench thinks that the neighbourhood will not change much: “There will still be drugs, alcohol, traffickers, dealers and all that.” A young man hanging out with friends by the Turkish kebab shop laughs at the idea that they would use the swimming pool afterwards: “We’re not children!” Yet others in his group display an unexpected optimism. “There will be a before and after for Saint-Denis,” declares a 20-year-old: “After the games, Saint-Denis will be super beautiful.” ■