From the UN Agenda 2030 to the organisation of a mega sustainable event: the case study of Paris 2024 Olympics.

In 2015, with the publication of the UN Agenda, sport has been recognized as instrumental for sustainable development. The Agenda consists of guidelines for the future and is in line with the recommendations of the 2020 Olympic Agenda: in fact, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) believes that sports and the Olympics can help develop the majority of the Agenda goals.

The next Olympics will be held in Paris in 2024 and will be the first organized according to the sustainability principles set up by the Agenda. This case is supposed to mark a turning point in the history of the Olympics. However, these objectives remain fairly vague in that they are not defined by concrete criteria.

Here we develop a method that starting from the analysis of the Agenda goals provides a series of requirements to discretise and evaluate quantitatively the long-term sustainability of the event. This study investigates, with particular focus on the urban and architectural aspects, the relations between the event and the host city, between people and context and between event and environment. Much importance is given to public infrastructures, the wellbeing of visitors and athletes and the needs of the host city. We study the Olympic venues, assessing how many of them already exist, are temporary, or have been built for the event, as well as which materials were used in the realization [fig.1]. We pay attention to the legacy of the event, which implies planning from the beginning the future of the city after the Games. In fact, the Olympics in Paris are part of a wider process of expansion of the city: the construction of a large infrastructure network, the Grand Paris Express, and the redevelopment of the suburban district of Seine Saint-Denis [fig.2].

With this method, we can easily analyse results of studies and field research, like visits to the building site, and evaluate the impact of the event. This study is the beginning of a process that allows us to analyse and compare different Olympic editions within a single coherent framework.