- July 22, 2024
It was a sunny morning in mid-June and the athletes’ village for the Summer Olympics, in Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was still nominally under construction. Workers sweated in hard hats and yellow vests, watching over the empty site. Built in the midst of various housing developments, the village sprawls across 128 riverine acres. Several dozen new, mostly beige, timber-frame apartment blocks, pleasant but banal, spill down to a tree-lined promenade along the Seine. Luc Besson’s former film studio complex, in a converted power plant, has been partly turned into the athletes’ mess hall.