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.
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...