“Disability in an advanced, civilized country should be common. This is not yet the case today in France.” The words are from Ryadh Sallem, a high-level parasport athlete, notably a player on the French wheelchair rugby team, and leader of the Cité Universelle project in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), “just on the other side of the ring road, opposite the Philharmonie. He was alongside the developer GA Smart Building and the two architects co-creators of the establishment to present on Thursday this “place exclusively reserved for all”, which must be built in 2027, three years after the Paralympic Games of the year next in the capital.
At the heart of the project, a 1,000-seat sports hall, where parasport will be king. And in the same fully accessible and adaptable location, a hotel, offices and coworking spaces, a company restaurant, the already existing prepound and a health center. “Treating the teeth of an autistic child or monitoring the pregnancy of a woman in a wheelchair requires special training for all types of disabilities,” says Nathalie Chapuis, director of Urban Innovation and Major Projects at GA Smart Building and Ryadh Sallem. . Because if the most visible disability concerns the two million people in wheelchairs (also called PMR), France today has around 12 million people with a recognized disability.
“Sew our two cities together despite the ring road”
On a plot of “urban neglect” and partly encroaching on the current Pantin prepound, the site which once hosted two gas stations, has been transformed into wasteland, just at the Porte de Pantin. “This building, a few hundred meters from the center of Pantin, will be a way of stitching together our two cities despite the ring road,” poetizes Bertrand Kern, the socialist mayor of this city bordering Paris, which has 60,000 inhabitants, spread across both sides. other from the Ourcq canal.
Before attending a wheelchair basketball demonstration on Place Olympe de Gouges on Thursday afternoon, he provided a few more anecdotes on the genesis of this project, which will therefore be established in a territory where several big names have already chosen to settle for twenty years: Hermès, Chanel, BETC, BNP Paribas.
“I had a small debt with Ryadh since I had prepared with him the application file to host the athletes’ village in Pantin for Paris-2024. As you have not missed, we came second with our wooden village project, a nod to the first Olympic village built with wooden cabins in Paris in… 1924! » They still decided to continue their collaboration to achieve this Universal City, winner of the call for innovative urban projects in 2017, “which is part of the legacy of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games”, adds Ryadh Sallem . “We don’t arrive too late, we take inspiration from it. And the state of mind and the vision on the handicaps triggered by the Paralympics at home will evolve. We will then need to have infrastructure to put parasport in its rightful place. This is the reason for the Universal City,” he concludes.