Even today, the Paris of the public’s imagination is almost always the Paris that people imagined. Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann And it became a reality in the 1850s and 1860s. He could not order the construction of entire cities, as Manuel Bravo explains: new video onParis has already existed for about 2,000 years, and over that time it has become larger, denser, and more complex. However, Haussmann, governor under Napoleon III, was given the power to forcibly carve out the city, opening “dozens of wide and long avenues connecting important parts of the city” whose layout “mirrored the Roman street network founded by Pope Sixtus V 300 years earlier, but on a much larger scale.”
No matter how gravely violent it inflicted on medieval Paris, this processOttomanizationAfter all, the capital of France was once a Roman city. Lutetia parisorum is named after the Parisis, a Gaulish tribe who lived on the island in the middle of the Seine that Parisians now call Ile de la Cité.
As usual, the conquering Romans cardo maximus It runs from north to south and is now known as Rue Saint-Jacques. Afterwards, “the rest of the original layout was lost to organic growth.” In the form that medieval Paris eventually took, “there were no significant public urban spaces.” There was no Place Dauphine, Place des Vosges, or Place Vendôme.
Paris’s squares, now enjoyed by locals and tourists alike, greatly contributed to fostering expectations of “aesthetic unity” in the city’s built environment centuries before Haussmann. It might be an understatement to say that Paris was frozen in the mid-19th century of the Barons, but as Bravo explains, a closer look at both the city’s famous spaces and overall form reveals how a much deeper past served to shape and inspire them. Urban history buffs can spend weeks, months, or even years admiring the details that remind us that even in places as perpetually researched as the Louvre, Paris’s palimpsest is never completely overwritten, even if it is rarely seen in person.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities and a book Stateless City: A Stroll Through Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
