Let's be really clear: Haussmann built an autocrat's city. He was the architect of Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the former French emperor, and the city was built during the so-called second empire. That is, it does not reflect democratic values. How does it not reflect them? Well, the broad avenues radiating from star-like intersections are meant to favor the artillery if rebels ever try to build a barricade. This structure was later used to shape Washington DC. These considerations were important because of the Paris Commune of the 1870s, where the people of Paris rebelled against what they felt was bourgeois oppression. Except for a few periods after WWI and WWII, when artists like Picasso or Hemingway briefly frequented a poor and beautiful city, Paris has been a bourgeois stronghold ever since. This has huge cultural ramifications, many of them negative, for life in the city, since a premium is put on proper behavior and, above all, silence. Haussmann's ravages pushed the working class out into the suburbs -- what people now refer to the Red Belt -- depriving Paris of much of its vibrant street life. There were huge tradeoffs in the makeover, so let's not unduly idolize him.
I'm in awe of the audacity of slipping unlimited power to construct roads into a bill about parks, while planning to become the person who would have that power. The authority in question was the ability to construct parks anywhere, and the right to build access roads for them. So he created a series of long narrow parks, and built big fat access roads down the middle. That is why those roads got named, "parkways"!
But the Interstates weren't specifically designed to give an advantage to the government in street fighting. Haussmann's boulevards were designed for easy access for artillery (and cavalry?), and to make barricade-construction impossible, as vonnik noted -- not to facilitate movement and redeployment like the Interstates. (I've heard the rumor that the Interstates were meant to facilitate suburbia from the start -- on the theory that if the country's population and economic activity spread out into the suburbs, we'd be harder to ruin with a small number of nuclear weapons.)
That said, Robert Moses was certainly a tyrant of urban planning on the same level as Haussmann. White ethnic populations of the Northeast still remember him, and have not yet forgiven him for his habit of running freeways through their neighborhoods -- ruining the neighborhoods in the process, and in many cases driving them out to the ethnically-homogenous blandness of the suburbs.
I'm also reminded of Le Corbousier. Architecture can certainly attract autocrats...
Once upon a time, there was a man here who built stuff, in Berlin for Albert Speer his name was. Philip Johnson and he was a wonderful artist and a moral monster. And he said he went to work building buildings for the nazis because they had all the best graphics. And he meant it, because he was an artist, as Mr Jobs was an artist. But artistry is no guarantee of morality.
How soon I forget the big one(s). Indeed, Hitler himself was more of an architect than anything else (talked about in a digression at http://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm); but I didn't want to Godwin's Law the matter straight out of the gate.
It's an interesting bit of curiosity how capital design kind of spread from France to the U.S. and then from the U.S. to Canberra. While other purpose built cities, like Brasilia had designs sourced locally.
It's contagious. Someone, develop a vaccine for this before it spreads... except that at this point the whole globe's caught it, and we seem to be developing an immune response at last.
The commune de paris wasn't "the people of Paris", it was the first major communist led coup. And a bloody one, which also saw the communards burning some of the monuments of Paris.
The supputative remaining of the "cour des miracles" (~ rue du Caire // north montorgueil, la butte aux cailles, ménilmuche & place St Marc appeals more to my heart of former parisian than 4 septembre, champs Elysee, havre cau, Bvd des Maréchaux and other boulevards.
For people interested in what Paris looked like before it became the Paris we know, I strongly recommend to have a look at Vergue (http://vergue.com), and especially at the work of photographer Charles Marville (http://vergue.com/category/Auteurs/Charles-Marville) who was commissioned to take pictures of streets that were going to be demolished or completely renovated.
Vergue is doing a fantastic job of not only renovating these photographs, but also provides a crazy amount of details for each of them (What were these posters about? What is that tool we see next to the entrance of that café ? etc.)… in French only, sorry :)
Magnifique. I've just spent 30 minutes perusing the website. I would pay good money to have access to a "live" VR exhibition of these old streets. Walking around Paris, in two different eras.
The article is poorly researched. Napoleon III's motivation was preventing insurrections, not improving health of Parisians or the smell of the streets. Haussman targeted areas favorable to guerrilla action from rooftops, to barricades, and to escape, which often happened to be the oldest in Paris. The new avenues down which a cannon could be fired from one of the city to the other during an insurrection, in a nice bit of unintended consequence, later made the job of the invading Prussians easier. Haussman's plans were opposed by a number of cultural figures, including Baudelaire, who believed the loss of a great number of medieval buildings was unconscionable.
The Catacombs was a public health issue. The older graveyards were full and bodies were rotting in the open. I can't remember if that also coincided with the collapse of a road into the tunnels underneath, but that was around the same time. +/- 100 years.
It's easy to forget how a "historic place" is actually not that old. Cities are constantly changing, we'd do well to not let preservationist instincts always trump new development and changes for a more useful city.
SF in particular should be more creative about finding ways to preserve neighborhood feel without making a suicide pact with the effective 3-stories-or-less limit in most areas.
This is so true. What a visionary. Paris would be a totally different beast if it was not for him. This makes you regret that there were no such visionary (on a similar scale) in the twentieth century.
Ugh, regarding the lack of such a twentieth century visionary, look up Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for an idea of what such a thing might have looked like!
The problem with LeCorbusier era (IMO) is that few people may understand what he was doing, and large scale project and industries would have led to yet another clusterfuck. Also his big plan, like many utopic and euphoric ideas of this era are only good on paper or as set for SF movies (lookup where total recall was filmed)
Le Corbusier indeed built shit after he became an ideologue first, and an architect second. Before that, his family residences were quite appealing though. But those were so bourgeois, the horror.
The work of Walter Burley Griffin in laying out the Australian capital city of Canberra deserves a mention...certainly a 20th century effort...
I backpacked Australia for 6 months back in 1985 and saw his work first-hand...though I'm in no way an urban planner, or civil engineer I had no trouble appreciating the influence of his methodology and planning...beautiful layout...
Beautiful photos of Canberra from Mt. Ainslie here:
I would like to agree. But unfortunately architects followed the same path as painters. Architects until the XIX were concerned about making things beautiful, carefully respecting ratios, etc. Modern architects have no such concern and now are trying to make things original, even if it means people must live in a world of raw concrete. Millions of tourists travel to see Paris. No such enthusiasm to visit modern cities. I would think twice before letting a modern architect wipe out a whole city.
New York had Robert Moses, who fucked the city up so badly that the subway carries half the people it once did, and the population has only just reached the pre-Moses highs.
Robert Moses? Maybe not with the same aesthetic results but for better or worse NY (and by influence much of the urban us) would be very different without him
