Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

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.

Huge public outlay for wide roads, originally designed for military use and now used heavily by civilians. Where have I heard that before?

Oh right. The US Interstate System! :-)

Incidentally for a similarly influential person in US history you have to look no farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses.

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.

https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...

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.

The german autobahn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#History

Not to be too pedantic, but the L'Enfant's DC plan precedes Haussmann's plan by 62 years.

It's true! I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe L'Enfant was applying the lessons from 1789...

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.

Brasilia was built a hundred years later

Kinda the point.

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.

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