Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Green, Blue, and Brown Infrastructures: A Case Study of the Paris 2024 Olympic Village

The Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Village, built in 2017-2025 in the Plaine Commune area (Seine Saint Denis department), is located on the banks of the Seine river, 9 km north of central Paris, France. It incorporates a range of developments and innovations for the city of tomorrow, with the aim of providing solutions to the major challenges facing our cities in 2050. In particular, this innovative design aim to combat excessive heat in urban environments and improve air quality, mixing nature-based solutions and technical innovations such as natural air flows, cooled sidewalks, shaded and vegetated areas.

In order to document the contribution of the village's facilities and innovations, and ultimately provide quantitative elements for the evaluation of public development policies, the Société de livraison des ouvrages olympiques (SOLIDEO) installed a set of environmental sensors spatially distributed throughout the village to measure meteorological (air temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction) and hydrological (temperature and water available to vegetation in the ground) parameters, as well as parameters characterizing air quality (concentration of particulate matter PM2. 5, concentration of certain gases. e.g. NO2, O3).

We present the village characteristics, the innovative infrastructure solutions, and the environmental monitoring network. Based on these observations, the spatial and temporal variability of thermal comfort and air quality in this village during summer 2024 is quantified. We assess how those variations are influenced by the local urban design (e.g. architecture and geometry, specific urban innovations, GBB infrastructure) and settings in the city context (e.g. sources of heat and pollutants, proximity to the Seine river). Further we analyse the role of those local effects in the context of different weather patterns and extreme events (e.g. heat waves).