Women Access to Urban Playground. A Legacy of Paris Olympics?

Aim and Research Questions The City of Paris will host the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024. This gigantic event plays an important role as a lever and the city of Paris has appropriated it to accelerate its public policies. The Parisian bid has brought legacy issues to the forefront, particularly intangible legacy. The city of Paris formalised its own action plan, in 2019 and organize actions to achieve the targeted objectives. One of them was a scheme to support women's sports on open-access sports fields. Theoretical Background The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the public policy conducted by the city of Paris. The work of Junod (2007) shows that sports events involve costly actions whose effects are limited or temporary. Consequently, our analysis, which falls within the framework of the sociology of public action, considers the "Paris sportives" system as an instrument of public action in the sense of Lascoumes and Le Gallès (2005) and provides an overview of its effectiveness and efficiency. This framework is all the more important as there is a strong distinction between the output: aid to clubs and the outcomes: accessibility of public space to women. The aim of this research is to measure the difference between outputs and outcomes. The evaluation is in line with the Olympic diamond model proposed by Chapelet (2020). By insisting on the link between the system and the transformation it is intended to bring about, this work goes beyond the work on the direct evaluation of systems with users (Hanlon et al., 2010) and that which observes the uses of places at macroscopic levels (Wicker, 2013) without questioning the factors transforming the uses linked to public policies. Methodology and Data Analysis "Paris sportives" is a programme that allows the city of Paris to pay subsidies to associations in return for organising non competitive sports activities exclusively for women on open-access courts. The evaluation of this scheme two years after its launch was carried out during the summer of 2022 on the basis of a survey involving observation, semi-directive interviews with users and organisers and a questionnaire survey of the winning associations. The scheme involved 23 associations that carry out their activities in 12 Parisian districts. It has reached approximately 2500 women in 2022. The evaluation was targeted at 12 sports grounds selected as a priority in the most disadvantaged areas, covering 7 of the boroughs around which 12 associations were operating, whose managers were interviewed. 47 interviews were conducted with the players who take part in the associations' activities just after the sessions, 47 interviews targeted the users of the grounds in the absence of the associations' presence, conducted during 58 observations carried out at different times of the day/week. The interviews were analysed thematically, focusing on: their sporting experience, information about the scheme, their use of the sport facilities, and their plans for using the pitch without the associations. The observations enabled us to quantify the presence of women and to study their relationship with the space and the sporting and non-sporting uses of the pitches. The heads of the associations were questioned about their objectives and involvement and the sustainability of their actions. Results and Discussion The action of the associations is very successful. After advertising their activities, word of mouth attracts new participants and attendance is high. Women were able to play a wide range of sports on the open-access pitches amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the results of the survey outside the presence of the associations are much less positive. Indeed, the action of the associations was often sufficient for the participants who did not feel the need to return to the sports fields between the two sessions. As a result, the observations revealed a female presence that was still marginal, with characteristics similar to the initial situation that had justified setting up the scheme. Indeed, the girls are often on the sidelines, spectators or with less commitment. They are almost totally absent from the matches and very rarely there are enough of them to play among themselves. Conclusion It is difficult to conclude on the effectiveness of the scheme. It is important to remember that the aim is to change behaviour at the societal level, since it is necessary for the entire female population to feel comfortable using their sports fields, and at the same time for the entire male population to accept it or not to create tensions in relation to this transformation. So the desired effect cannot be immediate. Nevertheless, the associative action thought of as the lever of a social transformation constitutes more of an isolated bubble, a suspended time in the use of the field. This study highlights the need to measure the expected outcomes, because the outputs can not be a reflection of the reality.