WHO will be the big winners in Paris this summer? Rhasidat Adeleke? Noah Lyles? Antoine Dupont? Simone Biles? Or maybe the city suburbs that produced Kylian Mbappé. Paris is undergoing huge change at the moment with a grand infrastructure plan that will unite the wealthy centre with the less well-off suburbs. 68 new metro stations are being built, along with a new suburban train line, which will transform the lives of 10 million people living in the banlieues.
This summer’s Olympics and Paralympics are the first stops. “Most of the infrastructure they’re building is not because of the Olympics, it’s kind of a separate project,” says Simon Kuper, author of Impossible City — Paris in the Twenty-First Century. “They’re only building the Aquatics Centre specifically for the Olympics and the Olympic Village — which is going to become housing straight after.
“But we’ve seen how hard it can be to build big infrastructure. Dublin has been talking about a metro system for years and it doesn’t happen. “You can’t imagine London or New York building 68 new metro stations.
So this is really quite massive. Some will open just before the Olympics. “I think you’re really going to see a transformation of Paris and we’ll first see it at the Olympics.
” Kuper is an acclaimed author and Financial Times journalist who has lived in Paris for over 20 years. In that time he has become Parisian in almost every way, raising a family and embracing everything from th.