ENJEUX 2024: Reframing the stakes of the paris 2024 Olympics
PROJECT a written thesis accompanying a documentary film examining the effects of the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics on surrounding communities.
FILM Refer to this page for more information about the documentary film Enjeux 2024.
COLLABORATORS Folio Films; Comite de Vigilance JO 2024 Saint-Denis; Notre Parc N’est Pas A Vendre
LOCATION Seine-Saint-Denis, France and New York City, NY
FUNDING The New School Student Research Award
PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS
Inaugural New School Research Symposium (April 2019)
Shaping Critical Urban Practices (Bushwick Generator Exhibit, May 2019)
Film screenings + debates at La Fabrik Coopérative (Paris, October 2019) and at Le Landy Sauvage (Saint-Denis, October 2019)
INTRODUCTION
A longstanding material and symbolic rupture divides Paris from its surrounding banlieues along class and racial lines. After decades of disinvestment, the banlieues are becoming a new frontier of real estate speculation and gentrification as Paris becomes increasingly unaffordable. With mega-urban development projects such as the new subway network Grand Paris Express and the 2024 Olympics on the horizon, deindustrialized suburban land is being strategically revalued through top-down State mechanisms in partnership with private actors. In the words of geographer Neil Smith (1979), a profitable “rent gap” is being created, carving out a new terrain for capital investment. Eighty percent of Olympic sites will be located in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb to the northeast of Paris home to many immigrant communities. While disguised in rhetoric around sustainability and equity, the 2024 Olympics provide a highly mediatized opportunity to rebrand Paris and its long-estranged suburbs as a global audience sets its eyes on the territory of Seine-Saint-Denis. Furthermore, the exceptional legal framework of the Olympics grants the State vast power to push forward unpopular development projects. If any lessons can be learned from previous Olympic iterations such as the 2012 London Games, it is that the Olympics tend to fast-track the dispossession of the poor and solidify the neoliberal mode of spatial production. In response to these threats, some residents in Seine-Saint-Denis have started mobilizing to claim their right to the city. However, current activist efforts around the Grand Paris and the 2024 Olympics tend to be siloed, and there is generally a lack of consciousness amongst the majority of residents of the stakes at play. To many, the 2024 Olympics seem like a distant event, which allows the State to quietly make major decisions with minimal resident involvement. How then, can these future threats be made tangible?