The Olympiades Esplanade

The Olympiades Esplanade is located on top of an old train station. It was built as a housing project in the 1960s aimed at a young middle-class population with commercial areas, sports centers, educational structures – notably Sorbonne University (Tolbiac) –, and parks. However, due to the height of the towers, Parisians found that the esplanade resembled the suburbs and therefore did not wish to live there. Consequently, the towers were under-occupied. It was with the arrival of about 145,000 refugees in 1975 that things changed; these boat people settled there, sometimes with several families per apartment to save money. The first Asian companies opened thanks to a tontine*, which allowed them to obtain loans that were impossible with the network of traditional banks. And thus, the largest Asian quarter in Europe was born.

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*A tontine is "an operation whereby savers agree to pool, for a given period, their savings which will be shared at maturity between the last survivor(s)." 

- Fonctionnement des tontines en Afrique, en Asie et dans les pays industrialisés, Atlas Magazine