Press Release - Paris 2024 Media Village

If the 2024 Paris Olympic Games take place in spite of all the obstacles surrounding the Olympic movement, two thousand international journalists will be housed in a brand new media village, near the Paris Le Bourget Exhibition Center, which will host the International Broadcast Center.

We are against this project. Because this media village would be built on the "Aire des Vents" (Windy Area), a public green space classified as a "Sensitive Natural Zone," an ecological corridor including a "Classified Wooded Area," which is an integral part of the Courneuve Georges-Valbon departmental park, the third largest park in Ile-de-France, designated as Natura 2000 (the European Union's network of nature protection areas). The amputation of the Aire des Vents will deprive the inhabitants of a space for breathing, leisure, sports and walking. It will seriously threaten the survival of the birdlife that has lived in this area for more than sixty years and will break the protective link between the Aire des Vents with the ecologically richest adjacent sectors of the park, which are home to animal species protected on a European scale.

Since 2012, the Departmental Council of Seine-Saint-Denis, the owner of the park, has been coordinating its "urban integration" through Grand Paris, a project aimed at transforming the Paris agglomeration into a major twenty-first century world metropolis - as if it were not already the case. In 2015, a citizen mobilization, gathering 20,000 signatories for a petition against the so-called "Central Park" project, prevented the construction of 24,000 housing units on 80 hectares on the edge of the park. Today the Departmental Council, which already supported the 2015 project, is trying again by taking advantage of the exemptions allowed by the "Olympics Bill (LOI n° 2018-202 du 26 mars 2018 relative à l'organisation des jeux Olympiques et Paralympiques de 2024)" to force through the urbanization of this ecological corridor. The large concrete machines and their promoters will have "total freedom" to build 1,300 housing units, mainly for home ownership, thus failing to meet the needs of people seeking housing in this department, which is one of the poorest in France.

According to France's Environmental Authority, few journalists would like to be housed there (we hope you are one of them). Moreover, according to the daily newspaper "Le Parisien" on March 14th, 2018, "During Evaluation Commission’s visit in May 2017, members of the International Olympic Committee had questioned the need to build a media village, the hotel capacity of Paris having been deemed sufficient." The only "utility" of this project is urban densification.

The Departmental Council of Seine-Saint-Denis, after two deliberations on December 10th, 2020, decided to sell 108,000 square meters (including 70,000 square meters of the Aire des Vents) to the Olympic Facilities Delivery Authority (Société de livraison des ouvrages olympiques: SOLIDEO). On December 28th, many local residents and users of the Aire des Vents filed an "Emergency Interim Proceeding" (Référé Suspension) to the Paris Court of Appeal to hold the sale. The court’s president must rule after January 26th. The chairman of the Seine-Saint-Denis Departmental Council has agreed to meet with a delegation representing the Aire des Vents defense collective.

Additionally, on Tuesday, January 12th, 2021, in the presence of the press, we noted that SOLIDEO was cutting 60-year-old trees with a chainsaw.

We will gather on January 30th at 10:30 am at the Edith Piaf Place in the city of Dugny to raise awareness among the residents of the Aire des Vents. We will also gather on February 6th at the Paris City Hall, where the President of SOLIDEO, Ms. Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, carries out her duties, to express our opposition to the current model of the Olympic Games, which gives a pretext to unnecessary and imposed projects like this one.

We ask you to relay this story in your country. Please question our leaders and officials.

Saccage 2024

https://www.facebook.com/saccage2024/

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