The media village for the 2024 Olympic Games, a development project of contested Olympic interest

Contrary to what its name suggests, the “media cluster” – its official name, abandoned since the Covid pandemic – is far from hosting all the journalists covering the 2024 Olympics.

The equipment will in reality only accommodate 1.500 people out of the 26.000 accredited journalists, mainly technicians working opposite in a press center at Le Bourget, where many TV sets will be based.

On the territory of the town of Dugny, in the faded park where the Humanity festival was historically held, 900 housing units have emerged from the ground in low, airy buildings with a strong emphasis on brick. Some 500 additional apartments must still be built after the Olympics to complete this “garden city of the XNUMXst century”, according to the advertising brochures.

"There could have been temporary equipment installed (...) they decided to do real estate speculation", regrets to AFP Jean-Marie Baty, president of MNLE 93, a local environmentalist movement which filed in court against the project.

For its opponents, the Olympics served as a "pretext" to satisfy a long-standing desire of Seine-Saint-Denis to urbanize this green plot in order to develop this isolated area of ​​the territory, in political compensation for hosting the Games. by the poorest department in mainland France.

With the media village, "we are in the planning of the territory more than in the Games", recognized in 2021 to AFP one of the actors in the file at the time when the site was in difficulty, when another source linked to the Olympics estimated at the time that "politically it would be complicated to give it up".

Project threatened

Because the media village almost never saw the light of day. Its fate hung by a thread in 2020 when the organizers of the Olympic Games had to cut the budget to save money.

In the name of "heritage" for the territory, the project was defended step by step by the president of the department, Stéphane Troussel, during a trip to Seine-Saint-Denis by Jean Castex, then Prime Minister .

"I manage to be able to go a part of the way with him in his car and I tell him: +but Jean, there are many projects in Île-de-France, in the dense area, of potentially 1.200 housing units in a few years that can come out of the ground? There is a housing crisis in Île-de-France (…) and there we are going to deprive ourselves of this opportunity? +", he tells AFP.

“A few days later he announced that not only will the media village be built but that the State is committed to carrying out the second phase”, welcomes the elected socialist.

Attacked in court in the name of defending the environment, the project also found itself suspended by the courts in April 2021, before being definitively validated three months later.

For the small town of Dugny, 11.300 people, the media village should ultimately increase the population by a third and diversify the housing stock.

In this working-class commune with 77% social housing, the highest rate in France, the new district is supposed to promote social diversity, with a third of housing reserved for homeownership.

“Friends who grew up like me in Dugny were unable to become owners or tenants because social housing did not meet their income criteria and were forced to leave Dugny even though they would have preferred to stay close to their family on the city", testifies the mayor (DVD) Quentin Gesell.

Out of a total cost of 60 million euros, the municipality only spent three, rejoices the councilor: "this leaves a legacy on the territory to respond to the challenges of the housing crisis in Île-de-France and residential mobility, and finances, thanks to the Olympics, equipment that would not have been able to see the light of day.