Les Grands Voisins — Paris's 3.4-Hectare Hospital Turned Housing, Enterprise and Culture Commons

Between the 2012 closure of the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul maternity hospital and the start of redevelopment works, the City of Paris and its planning operator, Paris & Métropole Aménagement, authorised a temporary occupation of the vacant 3.4-hectare site in the 14th arrondissement. From October 2015 to 2020, a consortium of three associations ran it jointly: Aurore provided emergency shelter and reintegration support for homeless and vulnerable people, Plateau Urbain sublet workspace at below-market rates to associations, start-ups, artisans and artists, and Yes We Camp opened and programmed the grounds as a public cultural space.
According to the Mairie du 14e arrondissement, the site was used simultaneously by around 2,000 people for housing, work or activities, with more than 1,000 people passing through its emergency-housing places over the project's life; it drew roughly 600,000 visitors a year and hosted more than 300 cultural and educational events with the help of some 5,000 volunteers — making it, by most accounts, the largest temporary-urbanism project in Europe at the time. It has since become a reference case in peer-reviewed planning research, including a 2021 International Planning Studies article on "temporary urbanism as a new policy strategy," which weighs such projects as genuine tools for testing uses ahead of permanent redevelopment against the risk that they legitimise gentrification without matching long-term commitments.
Rather than simply ending when construction began in 2018, planners deliberately carried the project's social mission into the permanent eco-quartier now rising on the site, which includes social housing, an emergency accommodation centre and space reserved for social-economy organisations — an explicit attempt to convert a time-limited experiment into durable neighbourhood policy.

Read the full analysis: https://mairie14.paris.fr/pages/le-projet-saint-vincent-de-paul-11216