2024 Paris Olympics: Eco-Fantasy or Game Changer?
The 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics brought together over 14,000 athletes and millions of visitors. The Paris organizers promised a greener Games, but is this truly possible? To answer this, TBG’s Sustainability Lead, Jordan Clark highlighted what the Paris Games are doing differently to host a mega-event against an increasingly unsustainable model. The challenge for Paris—to make the unsustainable somehow more sustainable—resonates with design professionals, planners, and urban policy makers across the world as we try to move the needle globally on sustainability.
Silver Medal: Planning for sustainability
Climate experts are vocal about the impossibility of a sustainable Olympics under the current model, despite admirable work being done. It’s an appropriate coincidence that Earth Overshoot Day fell at the midpoint of the 2024 Games, while a climate-change-induced heat dome hovered over Western Europe. There is also a long, darker history of ongoing social impacts that tarnish the polished image the IOC seeks to maintain. Against this backdrop, what is there to learn from the approach Paris took with these Games?
One aspect of the Paris Olympics we can mirror in our own work is investing time in developing an intentional, actionable plan for moving toward sustainability. After winning the 2024 bid, Paris organizers started the arduous planning process, developing a robust action plan addressing criticisms of the more conventional Olympic-games model. The Legacy and Sustainability Plan for the 2024 Olympics aims to deliver an edition of the games that can be an inspiring example in terms of climate, biodiversity, the circular economy and environmental resilience.
The Paris organizers had lofty ambitions, just as many of us do in making our own work sustainable. It is essential to clarify your vision and the steps toward it in an action plan. It’s also important that organizational leadership buys in and communicates their commitment. One critical component of this sustainability plan was that the actions were time-bound. Another is that it included measurable targets to shoot for, such as the widely touted “halving of emissions” compared to the London Games. It’s important to mention that climate watchdogs have criticized the Paris organizers for not being precise enough with their strategy, rigorous enough with their criteria and monitoring, or transparent enough with their disclosure methodology. We can learn from this, too.
As TBG’s Firmwide Sustainability Leader, Jordan has spent time learning about effective sustainability action plans (SAP)—something that TBG does not yet have formalized but recognizes will be a necessary step in measuring and tuning our impact. Firmwide SAPs are still relatively rare to see in landscape architecture and planning, but we can look to our sister discipline of architecture. One valuable resource is AIA’s primer on the subject: Creating a Sustainability Action Plan that works! It shows how other firms structured and pursued their SAPs, identifies what elements are essential, and how important effective change management is to the process. Also worth mentioning is ASLA’s Climate Action Field Guide. Released in 2022 with contributions from many of our friends across the profession, and some from right here in Texas, it provides excellent guidance for landscape designers and firms.
At TBG, the Field Guide has become a guiding document in how we think about our role and is informing our ongoing self-reflection as a company. It’s more a menu of actions and approaches than a how-to on setting up an action plan, so it pairs well with the AIA document. Building an action plan doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything yet, and it doesn’t mean you’ll succeed in what you commit to. But it can clarify a direction, empower people to act, and invite accountability.
Gold Medal: Adaptive reuse
We can also draw inspiration from what Paris is not doing—constructing enormous new venues for two weeks’ worth of use. Paris set an inspiring precedent by making the case for adaptive reuse, utilizing buildings, sites, and neighborhoods that could be readily adapted. In North America, treating land and the built environment as disposable is all too common, leading to immense environmental, resource, and climate costs. Paris exemplifies adapting pre-existing building stock for major events, a practice with a long history in the Olympics. As Nat Barker at Dezeen points out, “the first modern Olympics in 1896 took place in the restored, 2,000-year-old Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.”
We must also design places that can adapt over time, considering durability, cost-effective repairs, and responsible sourcing of materials. Out of all the cities we work in, San Antonio seems to have the most adaptive reuse momentum. Even TBG’s San Antonio office is housed in a nearly 100-year-old historic building. The building’s previous life in 1928 was as an antiques and flower shop. As of May, TBG had 13 ongoing or recent projects that fit this description, including the Pearl Brewery’s ongoing repurposing as an urban mixed-use hub.
Gold Medal: Robust cycling network
Paris’ ongoing transformation from car-choked to human-powered is noteworthy. Mayor Anne Hidalgo, an advocate for more walkable and bikeable cities, has made the reduction of air pollution and car dependency central to her campaign and mayoral activity. As a result of her leadership and the work of countless advocates, Paris is suddenly a cycling city.
One of the key features of the Paris Olympics is that every venue in the city is linked by 60 kilometers of high-comfort cycling routes. More importantly, this fits into a dense network of some 415 kilometers of cycle routes, using space in the right-of-way previously given to cars. And it’s not just space for movement. There’s been special care given to creating adequate bike parking, including spaces for cargo bikes, an essential tool for a parent with young children in cycling cities. At the same time, public space devoted to car parking is being reduced by more than 70%, to make more room for human activity. The result is a cleaner, quieter, more active city for Olympic visitors and athletes—and a more habitable city for Parisians pre- and post-games.
Yes, Paris’ metamorphosis into a 100% cycling city by 2026 represents a major reduction in air pollution and GHG emissions. This offers a new experience for residents, who now may choose to get around by bike. Less confident riders feel more comfortable giving it a shot when stress points in the network are resolved. Children have more opportunities for autonomy in a city where cycling and walking is both safe and inviting. People of all ages have more opportunities for active movement, which has innumerable benefits for mental and physical health and longevity. This, too, is a measure of sustainability.
Austin, Texas, offers a U.S. counterpart, with an ambitious vision for a 400-mile “all ages and abilities” bicycle network, taking cues from Dutch cycling design practices. Most importantly, Austin is moving from being a city where only the daring few, or those without other options, would cycle for transportation into one where more see it as a viable choice. It’s still a marathon to get to “100% cyclable,” but Austin is a great local example that there’s no reason the pace must be slow.
Gold Medal: More conscious use of materials
One of the most talked-about components of the design of these Olympics was the more thoughtful use of materials. For example, the timber aquatics center, the only permanent venue built for the Paris Summer Olympics, was constructed largely from carbon-storing timber. The Olympic Village, which features the rest of the permanent infrastructure built for the Olympics (intended to have a post-Olympic life) has been presented as a test lab for sustainable materials decisions. One example of a less proven, but interesting test case, is the seashells to construct an experimental sidewalk, which is supposed to absorb rain and evaporate on hot days to help with cooling. That may not be the next big trend, but we applaud any attempt to ask our built environment to do more for us. The organizers also say they used low(er)-carbon concrete in the Village. In addition, they claim to have recovered 94 percent of materials from deconstruction, and to have reconditioned 31,600 tons of concrete for reuse.
The small materials moves being made in Paris certainly resonate over here, as well. At TBG, we’ve been testing carbon estimation tools on a few pilot projects, and it has started prompting questions we weren’t asking enough before.
– Can we replace this paving material with a lower-carbon alternative?
– Can some of this hardscape, or this intensively managed lawn, become native planting without losing functionality?
– How can we maximize carbon sequestration potential through soil health and planting design?
And on and on. We’ve preliminarily built those types of questions into a beta-version project goal setting tool that we call the Sustainable Impact Compass. This tool is in its infancy and is constantly evolving as we use it more to assess project aspirations. What landscape carbon estimation tools like Pathfinder (used once you have specific material and planting qualities to enter) and Carbon Conscience (used in the earlier, planning stages of design) do is give data-driven feedback to force more specific discussions of materials tradeoffs. They aren’t perfect or exhaustive, but we’ve found that using them has prompted necessary conversations.
Conclusions for designers and planners
Even a mega-event with a serious, unsustainable environmental toll can still produce useful lessons and examples we can adopt and refine. As planners and designers, we face the tension between supporting conventional development models and our growing awareness of sustainability. But this challenge also offers us the opportunity to rethink and reshape our approach.
It’s our collective responsibility to be advocates for a more restorative system, alongside our work to become more sensitive designers and planners. Together, we can be champions of ecological stewardship and human well-being, honing our craft to create a lasting, positive impact. We understand we aren’t yet where we need to be. This is an ongoing challenge. That’s why we’re grateful for inspiration wherever we can find it.