They are known as the ghost stations: 16 stops on the Paris Métro system barred and padlocked nearly 70 years ago.

In the past seven decades, many ideas for their reinvention have been floated, including turning one into a swimming pool and others into bars and nightclubs. None have come to anything, but their allure remains.

Now, Paris city hall has put three of the phantom stations into an international competition to develop unused subterranean space. Thirty-four sites owned by regional authorities have been offered for development as economic, cultural or social spaces as part of the Reinvent Paris scheme.

The three stations are at Champ de Mars in the 7th arrondissement, Croix-Rouge in the 6th and Saint-Martin, which crosses the 3rd and 10th arrondissements.

Saint-Martin station’s moment of glory was in February 1932, when Paris line 9 was officially opened in the presence of Fulgence Bienvenüe, the father of the Paris underground system. It closed seven years later deemed too close to several other Métro stations and has been used as a day shelter for homeless people.

The Champ de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower, closed in 1939 having been declared unnecessary and underused. Croix Rouge, originally planned as part of a circle line, was abandoned in favour of linear routes bisecting the city.

“How could we refuse city hall’s initiative, especially as these places cause such a lot of excitement,” Franck Avice, director of the RATP transport company, said. “We’re putting the stations and their platforms at the disposal of people’s imaginations to see what new uses they can be put to.”

In 2014, unsuccessful mayoral candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet envisaged turning the abandoned station at Arsenal, near Bastille, into a swimming pool, and other disused platforms into nightclubs, discos and bars. Centre-right Kosciusko-Morizet lost the election to Socialist Anne Hidalgo and once again the idea of transforming the stations was forgotten.

Launching the Reinvent Paris programme, Hidalgo said Paris’s underground spaces were an “incredible wealth”. She said: “We should be doing something with them.”

The 34 sites, covering a total area of 100,000-150,000 sq metres, include five tunnels, three car parks, a former Renault garage, and vaulted cellars.

The deputy mayor, Jean-Louis Missika, said any plans had to respect certain constraints. “Not everything is possible ... There are underground spaces necessary for the functioning of Paris via the transport, drainage and heating systems as well as car parks and cellars, but they are often hidden and underused. We want to bring some verticality and depth to the city.”

It is the second time Reinvent Paris has been held. Previous projects focused on disused buildings.

Architects and developers are invited to study the proposed sites and submit their outlines by November. A shortlist will be made in 2018 and the final selection announced in November 2018.

