THE RE BIRTH OF PARIS

These were the conditions that urban planners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to eradicate, and nowhere is the programme of 'improvement' more obvious and more interesting to the historian than in Paris, where the city was blighted by disease, overcrowding, and squalor. In 1845 Victor Consid-erant, the French social reformer, wrote:

‘Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate. Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year.’

In his eyes, this was a festering city. What's more, these narrow Parisian streets lent themselves to revolution since, in such crowded conditions, it was a simple task to raise barricades and block roads.

Between 1853 and 1870, in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Paris became a construction site unlike anything the world had ever seen as the civil administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-91) waged war on the city's medieval build-ings. The numbers are extraordinary still: the project lasted for seventeen years; he knocked down 12,000 structures; the new buildings, boulevards, railway stations, parks and fountains he built cost Napoleon III some 2.5 billion francs, the equivalent of around €75 billion in today's money; a new aqueduct was built which increased the amount of fresh water brought into the heart of the city from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic metres of water a day. He imposed on Paris a grid system, with streets running north to south and east to west, dividing up the ancient medieval city into new sections, which created twenty arrondissements, or administrative districts. He took down an entire shambled city of dark lanes and leaning buildings and replaced them with those broad, straight boulevards and long lines of uniform buildings and parks that we immediately recognize today as Paris.

Although he is not without his critics, Haussmann's Paris became a model for urban design throughout European capitals such as Madrid, Stockholm, Rome, Brussels, Barcelona and Vienna, and was even influential in America - in New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. By removing the medieval lean, therefore, Haussmann not only altered the design and feel of many of our great cities and the health of generations of their inhabitants, but shaped the modern world. Elsewhere our medieval cities have vanished for different reasons: the exquisite Hanseatic port of Lübeck was burned by British incendiary bombs in March 1942, and Exeter in Devon, a Roman city described by many contemporaries as more beautiful than York, was hammered by the Luftwaffe in response.

Accidental fire destroyed medieval London in 1666; an earthquake toppled medieval Lisbon in 1755; and building projects everywhere have replaced the iconic lean of medieval timber and lath construction with the straight lines of cast-concrete block and rolled-steel beams. Where once we saw a leaning building as a threat to our health and a symbol of backwardness, we now see it as a rare and charming symbol of the past, something to be preserved.

Source ~ ‘ History of Unexpected ‘ by Sam Willis and James Daybell