Grand Designs
Mar. 23rd, 2022 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: City of Light - The reinvention of Paris, by Rupert Christiansen
This was a very quick read; it's a thin volume and has plenty of illustrations. The focus is on Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's mid-nineteenth century urban fixer, although there is some background from the earlier Bourbon restoration and the book runs through to the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris commune, and has an epilogue bringing the reader up-to-date with twenty-first century changes. The perennial problem of poor quality slum housing and shanty-town dwellings has the perennial solution of clearance and gentrification. Some of Haussmann's dealings might have bordered on corruption, but at the time they generally passed as pragmatic ways of tackling the problems, at least until the bills came in. The book draws attention to various concerns of the city at that time, notably the way to curtail and control "the mob" through wide boulevards rather than narrow streets, and the progress of the railways. Yet, on the latter account, it's interesting that Paris, like London, is a city of railway termini: despite an extensive compulsory purchase scheme cutting swathes through the centre for new roads, there doesn't seem to have been any appetite for through trains, and this doesn't get a mention.
This was a very quick read; it's a thin volume and has plenty of illustrations. The focus is on Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's mid-nineteenth century urban fixer, although there is some background from the earlier Bourbon restoration and the book runs through to the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris commune, and has an epilogue bringing the reader up-to-date with twenty-first century changes. The perennial problem of poor quality slum housing and shanty-town dwellings has the perennial solution of clearance and gentrification. Some of Haussmann's dealings might have bordered on corruption, but at the time they generally passed as pragmatic ways of tackling the problems, at least until the bills came in. The book draws attention to various concerns of the city at that time, notably the way to curtail and control "the mob" through wide boulevards rather than narrow streets, and the progress of the railways. Yet, on the latter account, it's interesting that Paris, like London, is a city of railway termini: despite an extensive compulsory purchase scheme cutting swathes through the centre for new roads, there doesn't seem to have been any appetite for through trains, and this doesn't get a mention.