In the Good News newsletter – thanks to Pam P.
A new low-carbon, mixed-use neighborhood was designed with the city’s future in mind. The Olympics is just a temporary guest.
When thousands of athletes move into the Olympic Village on the outskirts of Paris next month, they’ll be staying in buildings that were ultimately designed for another use: to become part of a sustainable new neighborhood. It’s the opposite of what has happened in previous Olympics, when cities have tried to figure out what to do with relics of the Games as an afterthought.
“It’s not that we’re reusing things and transforming them into housing,” says architect and urban planner Anne Mie Depuydt, founder of the design firm UAPS, who served as the coordinating architect for one section of the Olympic Village. “It’s a new neighborhood, and we made sure that within the apartments and the office buildings we can adapt them to receive the athletes for the Olympics.”
Le Village Olympic built in Montreal for the 1976 Olympic athletes has been used as rental housing ever since. Maybe has something with thinking in French???