An Olympic swimming pool which is to serve as a training pool for the athletes of the 2024 Olympics must encroach on part of these allotment gardens cultivated by residents. Several hundred demonstrators marched in the town this Saturday to protest against this project.
The Aubervilliers Olympic swimming pool project is straining well beyond the gardeners who cultivate these plots of land. Several hundred people demonstrated this Saturday, April 17 against the project whose work is imminent.
At the heart of the dispute, a swimming complex comprising three pools (one of which is 50 meters) with sports halls, saunas, hammams and a solarium.
“We are not against the fact that there is equipment that is being installed in Aubervilliers, namely a 50-meter Olympic training pool. We are against the fact that this Olympic training pool is designed with a specific budget which requires having a solarium, that is to say a terrace for sunbathing which encroaches on century-old workers’ gardens “, explains Viviane Gribeau-Genest, gardener and treasurer of the association which manages the gardens.
1 hectare of threatened gardens
The project, often shelved, followed the failures of the various candidatures of Paris for the Olympic Games. In 2016, when the neighboring town of Saint-Denis was chosen to host the swimming events, the defenders of the project were once again disillusioned.
“The Organizing Committee for the 2024 Olympics, however, made a flower in Aubervilliers: in 2018, it promised a training pool where the athletes would warm up. Not an Olympic swimming pool, therefore, but a nautical center all the same, built around a 50-meter pool “, explains the Metropolis of Greater Paris.
A flower that would have gone well the associations who denounce a project not suited to the territory. “It is not normal that an ephemeral event, the Olympic Games, destroy centuries-old gardens. It is an agricultural heritage and it harms the environment. We are in a period of climatic emergency, global warming is here in Aubervilliers with repeated heat waves “, continues Viviane Gribeau-Genest.
According to Collective for the defense of the workers’ gardens of Aubervilliers, 1 hectare of the 7 cultivated gardens are threatened (4000 m² by the solarium and 6000 others for the construction of a Grand Paris Express station). The collective launched a petition which gathered more than 60,000 signatures and nearly 4,000 euros were collected to organize the fight.
“Too late” to change the project
“In this project we have the preservation of this heritage including the seven hectares of gardens, it is a long-standing commitment”, defends Camille Vienne-Thery, project director at Grand Paris Aménagement, owner of the land. She also argues that the dislodged gardeners will first be accommodated in these neighboring gardens then will have another site on “a football field which is fallow”.
On the side of the town hall, we answer that it is “too late”. Mayor (UDI) Karine Franclet believes that breaking the public market would mean “4.7 million euros” in penalties. Modifying it would also mean delay, “and here we are already very tight on schedule”, she emphasizes.
The one who says she inherited a “complicated file” initiated by her communist predecessor, however, rents equipment “essential” for “to be part of the adventure” Olympic and educational aim, in a department where one in two children cannot swim when they enter sixth grade.
“We have an architect who made a simulation that any Olympic swimming pool enters an already artificialized parking lot, that of the Fort d’Aubervilliers. With a little political will, we can put this terrace, if it is considered essential for the equipment. , on the roof. This is also done in Issy-les-Moulineaux “, retorts Ms. Gribeau-Genest.
To build the aquatic center – 33.6 million euros – the City, the contracting authority, will benefit from subsidies from the State and the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, and around 10 million euros from the Solideo, the delivery company for Olympic books.
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