Les Olympiades and Paris Chinatown

Neighborhood · Les Olympiades, Quartier de la Gare (13th)Paris,France

A failed 1970s concrete platform of towers in Paris that Southeast Asian refugees bought into and turned into the largest Asian quarter in France.

Les Olympiades is a raised concrete platform with eight tower blocks standing on it, and it holds the largest Asian quarter in Paris. Shops and walkways sit on a slab ten metres above the street, cars and deliveries run underneath it, and each tower is named after a city that has held the Olympic Games. The city built it between 1969 and 1977, as part of a plan to rebuild the whole district in towers. Then the property market fell. The flats did not sell, and the scheme was judged a failure before it was finished. What saved it was who arrived next. From 1975, war and the Khmer Rouge drove refugees out of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Many of them were ethnic Chinese. The unsold flats here were cheap and available at exactly that moment. Families bought them, opened shops on the slab and in the avenues below, and turned a failed piece of planning into a working quarter. A Buddhist temple sits in a former car park under the concrete, reached down a ramp between parking bays. The New Year parade through these streets in January or February is the largest in France.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Everything here is on two levels — Street level is avenues and traffic; the slab above it is the quarter's own square. Miss the escalators and you miss half of what is here.
Lunar New Year is the day — The parade fills these avenues in January or February and the whole quarter turns out for it, which is the one date worth planning around.
The temple is in use — People come to it to pray rather than to be looked at, so go in quietly, photograph nobody at an altar, and stay at the back.
Eat where the menu is not in French — The restaurants aimed at the quarter rather than at visitors are the ones with no translation and no photographs in the window.
The concrete is worth looking at in its own right — This is a complete piece of 1970s planning still working the way it was drawn, which is rare enough to be worth the walk on its own.

Things to do

1
Take the escalator up onto the slab and look up
From the avenue, find one of the escalators or stair flights and go up. You come out on a wide floor of open concrete, with towers around it, shops along one side and no traffic at all. Turn round: the street you were standing on a moment ago now runs below you, under the concrete. Then get to the middle with a tower on either side and look straight up — each is about a hundred metres tall and named after an Olympic host city, in concrete letters near the base.
2
Go down the ramp to the temple
Under the slab, follow the signs down a vehicle ramp between parked cars. At the bottom there is a door. Inside, the air smells of incense and the room is painted red and gold, with a line of altars along it. The ceiling above them is still the concrete deck of the car park, with its pipes running across. Take your shoes off and stand at the back.
3
Read the signs on the big avenue
Walk one of the wide avenues at street level and look only at the shopfronts. You will see Chinese characters, Vietnamese with its accent marks, Khmer script and Lao script, sometimes with French underneath and sometimes with no French at all. Count how many written languages you pass inside two hundred metres.