Today, President Emmanuel Macron will open the last of the big Olympics-linked projects, probably the most important. Not another stadium, but a metro station: Saint-Denis-Pleyel.
This is the new terminus of the high-speed line 14 christened Project Météor, which will link the southern Orly airport with the northern suburbs around Saint-Denis. More stations will open by the end of the year, and it will be the longest of Paris’s 16 Metro lines, at 30km with 21 stations.
Saint-Denis has long been notorious for the drugs, violence and racial unrest depicted in the 1995 film La Haine, but for planners of the Grand Paris project, it is a future Eldorado. Macron described the region as a potential new California, and the 2024 Olympics bid was conceived as a key building block in this vision.