Paris 2024 must learn from London’s broken promises if legacy is to be lived up to | Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Big news last week about the Olympic Park slide. You may have missed it amid the euphoria and phantasmagoria of Sunday night’s Paralympic closing ceremony, when the curtain finally fell on the vibrant summer panorama of Paris 2024. Under the circumstances, the fate of the ArcelorMittal Orbit – Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in east London that, like all good art, was named after a global steel conglomerate and, against its creator’s wishes, fitted with a giant slide – is something of a totemic, even cautionary, Olympic tale.

Officially, Orbit has been closed for maintenance since early 2024. In practice, visitor numbers have remained largely unaffected. The original projections of 350,000 a year were, it turns out, just one of London 2012’s great numerical fictions. The actual number averages around 93,000, which, given the high maintenance costs, means London taxpayers are still effectively paying for it.

But lo and behold. Help is at hand. Last week, the London Legacy Development Corporation – which manages the entire Olympic Park site – announced that zipline operator Zip World would take over the Orbit and reopen it in 2025 following a planned £2.6 million investment. “We are thrilled,” an LLDC spokesperson announced in an official statement, promising “a whole new era of excitement and adventure in the heart of London.”

Promises upon promises; visions upon visions; numbers plucked from thin air; the corporate bullshit dial at 25. As Paris begins to sketch out its own post-Olympic life, the transformation of east London by the 2012 Games is often held up as some kind of shining example. Flick through the financial pages and the investment press and you’ll be left with the impression that the legacy of the London Games has been a dazzling success story, and in many ways it has been. But it largely depends on where you choose to look.

Let’s start here, in the stubborn shadow of the Orbit, on the banks of the Waterworks River, where a graveyard of discarded household appliances known locally as Fridge Mountain once stood. Across the river, Zaha Hadid’s imposing Aquatics Centre, where an off-peak dip now costs £7.85 for non-members. Further east, the bright lights and designer emporiums of Westfield shopping centre, and beyond that – like sentries on guard – the grey tower blocks of Victory Plaza, where a one-bedroom flat will set you back £2,500 a month. Something has been given here. But something has also been taken away.

This is far from the tried and tested Olympic story of white elephants and decay. These are homes and shops and parks and roads that people actually use, even if parts of the space still feel breathtakingly deserted. Major brands and cultural institutions have moved there or are about to move there: Ford, the BBC, the V&A Museum, avatar Abba. In almost every way, the billions of pounds of public investment have been recouped many times over. The real question is who benefited. Who was it all for, after all?

Not so the residents of Newham, Hackney and Waltham Forest, thousands of whom have been waiting for years for social housing as luxury developments grace the skyline. Of the 33,000 new homes due to be built on or near the Olympic site by 2036, just over a third will be affordable, compared with the original promise of 50%. And this is something of a gimmick in itself, since the coalition government’s redefinition of “affordable housing” leaves it out of reach for most low-income families. Only around 1,000 social homes have been built.

On the other hand, if you’re an affluent young professional, perhaps one of the many tech workers priced out of Clerkenwell and Shoreditch, this is your playground. And of course, this is a more familiar Olympic story, from Rio de Janeiro to Tower Hamlets: gentrification under the guise of regeneration, a revolution for the wealthy that effectively locks marginalised groups out of their own city. In the two decades to 2021, Stratford’s black population fell from 31% to 17%. Perhaps, from a certain perspective, this is what sparkling success looks like.

Paris, like London, has embarked on its legacy project with noble ideals and eloquent promises. Two extended metro lines, opened just before the start of the Games, are a prelude to the generational task of bridging the historical gap between the chocolate box and the center city and the poorer suburbs. The hasty clean-up of the Seine River for the triathlon events is part of a long-term project to make the river available for public use again. Organizers have promised that 32% of new homes in Saint-Denis, the site of the athletes’ village and one of the worst poverty areas in mainland France, will be set aside for social housing.

But of course the promise is the easy part. What defines reality is political will, economic space, the gymnastics of the possible in a landscape of increasingly impoverished public sectors. And at the heart of all Olympic legacy projects is a more fundamental question: who is sport for, who should benefit from its largesse, in which direction should the money flow.

“I didn’t run in the Olympics because I wanted three weeks of sport,” Ken Livingstone once said. The former mayor of London knew that major events are increasingly one of the few reliable engines of infrastructure capital, of unleashing the billions needed for real transformation. But the cranes dotting the Stratford skyline portend a very different kind of transformation than he had in mind.

London’s housing crisis continues to deepen. Immigrants will continue to be blamed. Mayor Sadiq Khan has tried to undo much of the damage done by his fundamentally unserious predecessor Boris Johnson, whose idea of ​​social good was a giant slide that no one asked for. But in a sense the die has been cast, the legacy squandered, the mistakes made. Paris at least has a chance to do better.

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