Once it is completed the Grand Paris Express (GPE) network will link forty or so university and Grand Ecole establishments located in its station neighbourhoods. This reveals one of the strategic dimensions of the project : to bring students’ lodgings closer to their place of study, to give faster access to the Parisian cluster and to offer students an opening up of the limits imposed by the current network.
The study, made up principally of a collection of maps shows that by 2030 the Grand Paris Express will have changed means of transport to and from higher education campuses with greatly improved services. It will thus become much quicker to reach numerous establishments. Likewise, many students living in station neighbourhoods will be able to travel more easily and quickly, finding their area of mobility enlarged and their “range of possibilities” expanded. In 2018, there were 130 higher education establishments in Grand Paris Express station neighbourhoods, around forty of which are university and Grand Ecole sites; 96,000 students live in GPE station neighbourhoods. A dozen of these have already formed student communities.
The territories that the future network will run through and serve also shed light on neighbourhoods which are under-provided for in terms of higher education, notably those in the north eastern quarter of Grand Paris where lines 15 East, 16 and 17 run. In these areas, there is still land and real estate that can be mobilised, this combined with the future, improved transport system could supply leverage for producing an offer adapted to local needs and contribute to addressing inequalities in metropolitan territories. Station neighbourhoods form centralities where the creation of suitable accommodation, mixed with specific services (common work spaces, sports centres) and the presence of e-learning centres with sufficient seating could address, at least partially, the needs of students who are far from their higher education establishment.
The study also presents 4 university campuses being developed or expanded, Saclay, Condorcet, Descartes, and also Villejuif, whose great success is in part linked to the new transport services provided by the Grand Paris Express.
