WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.520 --> 00:00:03.970 Commons license. 00:00:03.970 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.660 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.350 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.350 --> 00:00:17.190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:18.320 at ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:28.740 --> 00:00:32.640 JULIAN BEINART: Let me go through the second set 00:00:32.640 --> 00:00:35.790 of papers with you, which deal with today's class. 00:00:40.460 --> 00:00:54.580 On the first page, is a diagram, two diagrams of Paris. 00:00:58.970 --> 00:01:06.830 If London-- what are the major features of London 00:01:06.830 --> 00:01:08.585 that we discussed on Tuesday? 00:01:11.420 --> 00:01:17.855 The rights of citizens to control their own land. 00:01:17.855 --> 00:01:23.600 Because they [INAUDIBLE] through the reign of Charles II. 00:01:23.600 --> 00:01:29.840 Secondly, the decision to make transportation, 00:01:29.840 --> 00:01:33.350 public transportation, a fundamental aspect 00:01:33.350 --> 00:01:36.950 of the organization of the city leading to, 00:01:36.950 --> 00:01:38.930 amongst others, to lower density. 00:01:41.690 --> 00:01:45.950 Thirdly, the presence of the aristocracy 00:01:45.950 --> 00:01:49.910 in the center of the city, subdividing to take 00:01:49.910 --> 00:01:54.035 care of a rising middle-income middle class. 00:01:57.480 --> 00:01:58.525 The rest are details. 00:02:01.920 --> 00:02:08.690 The fire and the plague, just disasters 00:02:08.690 --> 00:02:14.920 which brought about certain fundamental changes 00:02:14.920 --> 00:02:24.120 such as the imposition of the new sewage system. 00:02:24.120 --> 00:02:27.540 Paris is a very different city. 00:02:27.540 --> 00:02:31.920 You've all been to Paris, so you know what I'm talking about, 00:02:31.920 --> 00:02:32.580 I hope. 00:02:36.330 --> 00:02:41.760 For reasons which are not clear to me, in the 18th century 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:48.540 already, in 1750, there was a competition 00:02:48.540 --> 00:02:55.980 held by Louis XV, who was already safely ensconced 00:02:55.980 --> 00:02:59.595 in Versailles, 18 miles from the center of Paris. 00:03:02.290 --> 00:03:03.940 This is not a place to eat. 00:03:03.940 --> 00:03:07.110 I'm sorry, Michaela. 00:03:07.110 --> 00:03:10.430 It's difficult to have classes at lunchtime, but-- 00:03:10.430 --> 00:03:11.130 STUDENT: Sorry. 00:03:11.130 --> 00:03:13.380 JULIAN BEINART: It's OK. 00:03:13.380 --> 00:03:15.692 Is it cold or hot? 00:03:15.692 --> 00:03:16.403 STUDENT: Cold. 00:03:16.403 --> 00:03:17.820 JULIAN BEINART: Oh, so it'll last. 00:03:21.030 --> 00:03:29.310 There was a competition to make the center of Paris resemble 00:03:29.310 --> 00:03:31.710 Versailles. 00:03:31.710 --> 00:03:35.880 It was won by a man called Patte, P-A-T-T-E. 00:03:35.880 --> 00:03:39.570 And I will show the plan. 00:03:39.570 --> 00:03:43.560 The elements of the plan establish 00:03:43.560 --> 00:03:47.010 a number of fundamentals. 00:03:47.010 --> 00:03:50.830 First of all, there are walls. 00:03:50.830 --> 00:03:55.140 Look at the number of walls that encompass the city 00:03:55.140 --> 00:03:59.790 from over the 900 years-- 00:03:59.790 --> 00:04:02.400 well, even more than the 900 years as a kingdom. 00:04:05.560 --> 00:04:08.570 The first wall, in 1250-- 00:04:08.570 --> 00:04:11.950 the first wall in AD 250. 00:04:11.950 --> 00:04:13.340 That was a Roman wall. 00:04:13.340 --> 00:04:17.274 The Romans left, more or less, 500 AD. 00:04:21.990 --> 00:04:26.550 The subsequent walls are the 12th century wall, 00:04:26.550 --> 00:04:29.820 the 14th century wall, the 17th century wall, 00:04:29.820 --> 00:04:35.790 the 18th century wall, the 19th century wall, the Périphérique. 00:04:35.790 --> 00:04:39.360 You'll notice that whenever an enclosing wall 00:04:39.360 --> 00:04:41.490 hits a main axis-- 00:04:41.490 --> 00:04:44.380 in this case, the Champs-Élysées-- 00:04:44.380 --> 00:04:46.020 there's an important place. 00:04:46.020 --> 00:04:50.130 The Étoile, the Porte Maillot, the Place de la Concorde. 00:04:55.120 --> 00:05:01.720 Paris has-- was built out of three fundamentals, streets, 00:05:01.720 --> 00:05:06.625 walls, and-- 00:05:11.250 --> 00:05:12.980 there were three. 00:05:12.980 --> 00:05:16.480 One is escaping for the moment. 00:05:16.480 --> 00:05:21.370 Let's just continue through this. 00:05:28.350 --> 00:05:38.970 The next page is the final step in the transformation 00:05:38.970 --> 00:05:46.600 of the center of Paris by the work of Haussmann, 00:05:46.600 --> 00:05:52.570 from about 1850 to 1872. 00:05:52.570 --> 00:06:01.190 1872 marks the end of the kingdoms of Paris, 00:06:01.190 --> 00:06:06.580 which started with in 987 AD. 00:06:06.580 --> 00:06:11.020 And the third of the components that I was going to mention 00:06:11.020 --> 00:06:14.020 were monuments. 00:06:14.020 --> 00:06:17.380 Prime example of a monument which 00:06:17.380 --> 00:06:25.860 persists from the beginning in the 12th century, added to 00:06:25.860 --> 00:06:35.250 and transformed over time by kings and their queens giving 00:06:35.250 --> 00:06:41.370 it its final shape through the work of Louis Napoleon III. 00:06:41.370 --> 00:06:46.320 And then, finally, the Arc du Carrousel, the center 00:06:46.320 --> 00:06:49.840 point being the work of an American architect. 00:06:52.680 --> 00:07:00.450 The diagram below is from work and writing 00:07:00.450 --> 00:07:05.100 by Guy Debord, which argues-- 00:07:05.100 --> 00:07:10.620 Guy Debord and Asger Jorn and Victor Constant, 00:07:10.620 --> 00:07:15.930 all participants in the movement called the Situationists. 00:07:15.930 --> 00:07:21.730 Situationists believed in something they 00:07:21.730 --> 00:07:24.070 called psychogeography. 00:07:24.070 --> 00:07:28.690 That was the system in which the experience of cities which 00:07:28.690 --> 00:07:33.100 was not delimitated by simple boundaries. 00:07:33.100 --> 00:07:39.070 This diagram indicates that the experience of Paris 00:07:39.070 --> 00:07:45.220 is much to be made, not through the compartments designed, 00:07:45.220 --> 00:07:47.410 administrative components designed 00:07:47.410 --> 00:07:52.690 by Haussmann, but as a free system of movement, 00:07:52.690 --> 00:07:57.640 much like a taxi ride moves through a city, 00:07:57.640 --> 00:08:00.880 independent of boundaries. 00:08:00.880 --> 00:08:02.450 There is a film which they referred 00:08:02.450 --> 00:08:04.060 to which I can't remember. 00:08:04.060 --> 00:08:06.760 It's a film of a French prostitute 00:08:06.760 --> 00:08:08.320 who works freely in the city. 00:08:13.200 --> 00:08:14.880 I tried. 00:08:14.880 --> 00:08:17.310 I can't remember. 00:08:17.310 --> 00:08:24.370 The next page indicates another use of the streets. 00:08:24.370 --> 00:08:31.670 1848-- the two revolutions of 1848 and 1871, 00:08:31.670 --> 00:08:36.710 the idea of the street as a system of barricades. 00:08:36.710 --> 00:08:40.174 The next page is a section through the boulevard house. 00:08:46.520 --> 00:08:57.310 This is a typical section in a Haussmann elevation, one, two, 00:08:57.310 --> 00:09:03.940 three, four, five, floors, the fifth floor being the roof. 00:09:03.940 --> 00:09:06.280 There's a pharmacy on the ground floor, 00:09:06.280 --> 00:09:09.070 some commercial activity. 00:09:09.070 --> 00:09:11.380 The first and second and third floors 00:09:11.380 --> 00:09:14.365 are middle-class apartments, and the top floor 00:09:14.365 --> 00:09:18.430 is where the artists [INAUDIBLE] La Boheme 00:09:18.430 --> 00:09:23.590 and La Traviata and so on happened in the top floor. 00:09:27.070 --> 00:09:39.700 This construction is one of the keys to the density of Paris. 00:09:39.700 --> 00:09:41.740 Paris has always been dense. 00:09:41.740 --> 00:09:44.770 It's attracted enormous amount-- it was the greatest 00:09:44.770 --> 00:09:49.580 manufacturing city in the second half of the 19th century 00:09:49.580 --> 00:09:53.230 and attracted immigrants. 00:09:53.230 --> 00:09:56.200 Not national, not extranational immigrants, 00:09:56.200 --> 00:10:03.860 but rural immigrants to the city between the period of 18-- 00:10:03.860 --> 00:10:05.150 oh. 00:10:05.150 --> 00:10:06.700 We'll get there. 00:10:16.110 --> 00:10:20.035 OK, I think that's the last of the pages. 00:10:31.600 --> 00:10:36.350 The walls are interesting for a number of reasons. 00:10:36.350 --> 00:10:37.585 They consume capital. 00:10:40.290 --> 00:10:53.610 The last 19th century wall created a large space north 00:10:53.610 --> 00:10:58.290 of the current Haussmann city. 00:10:58.290 --> 00:11:02.070 Today, two million people live in the center of Paris 00:11:02.070 --> 00:11:06.210 and six million people live in the Banlieues, which is 00:11:06.210 --> 00:11:09.390 the suburban sprawl condition. 00:11:09.390 --> 00:11:13.180 Which the competition, Sarkozy's competition of 19-- 00:11:17.140 --> 00:11:18.640 what are we? 00:11:18.640 --> 00:11:23.470 Or 2008, which some example-- and we'll 00:11:23.470 --> 00:11:26.050 go through some examples from that competition. 00:11:29.160 --> 00:11:34.740 So, essentially, the other interesting aspect of the wall 00:11:34.740 --> 00:11:36.255 was that it paid. 00:11:36.255 --> 00:11:41.580 It brought in a lot of money to Haussmann's capacity 00:11:41.580 --> 00:11:55.060 to engage in loans from banks to pay for the purchase of land 00:11:55.060 --> 00:11:56.270 in order to divide-- 00:11:56.270 --> 00:11:59.952 [INAUDIBLE] his new road systems. 00:11:59.952 --> 00:12:06.000 The octroi, O-C-T-R-O-I, was a major source of income. 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:11.240 Wine and food was taxed at the gate. 00:12:11.240 --> 00:12:13.850 This is a device which is still common. 00:12:13.850 --> 00:12:17.750 Robert Moses used the income because he controlled 00:12:17.750 --> 00:12:22.280 the taxation system of transportation into New York 00:12:22.280 --> 00:12:25.430 through the bridges and tunnels. 00:12:25.430 --> 00:12:28.610 In Boston, we have the same silliness, 00:12:28.610 --> 00:12:35.360 that we still pay tolls to the authority which 00:12:35.360 --> 00:12:41.960 runs the Seaport, badly, and the airport. 00:12:41.960 --> 00:12:44.795 It's an old system, paying at the gate. 00:12:47.740 --> 00:12:54.760 So we want to look at 900 years of history, 00:12:54.760 --> 00:12:57.320 and I'm just going to pick out some aspects of it 00:12:57.320 --> 00:13:01.060 because, really, one-- this is an enormous topic. 00:13:01.060 --> 00:13:08.410 And I want to concentrate on the spatial environmental issues 00:13:08.410 --> 00:13:11.410 and relate them back historically. 00:13:11.410 --> 00:13:16.930 So, for instance, Henry IV, one of the great kings 00:13:16.930 --> 00:13:37.390 of Paris, 1533 to 1610, had a second wife 00:13:37.390 --> 00:13:40.330 called Marie de' Medici. 00:13:40.330 --> 00:13:42.970 There were two Medici women who were 00:13:42.970 --> 00:13:49.520 important in these years in Paris. 00:13:52.890 --> 00:13:55.845 She introduced another idea into the street system. 00:14:06.590 --> 00:14:12.550 In Florence, streets were closed so 00:14:12.550 --> 00:14:15.760 that people could play games. 00:14:15.760 --> 00:14:24.450 The games were called, in Italian, magliare, to hit, 00:14:24.450 --> 00:14:26.310 la palla, a ball. 00:14:32.050 --> 00:14:34.292 Right? 00:14:34.292 --> 00:14:35.180 STUDENT: Magliare? 00:14:35.180 --> 00:14:36.770 JULIAN BEINART: Magliare. 00:14:36.770 --> 00:14:40.846 Maglio is a hammer, isn't it? 00:14:40.846 --> 00:14:41.429 STUDENT: Yeah. 00:14:41.429 --> 00:14:42.375 Never heard, that one. 00:14:42.375 --> 00:14:44.240 But, yeah, maglio is a hammer. 00:14:44.240 --> 00:14:44.740 Yes. 00:14:44.740 --> 00:14:46.365 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, magliare la palla 00:14:46.365 --> 00:14:53.590 is the phrase which is used to describe 00:14:53.590 --> 00:14:59.380 the games they played like croquet, with hitting a ball. 00:14:59.380 --> 00:15:01.690 There are versions of this game, obviously. 00:15:21.340 --> 00:15:26.110 The area around Buckingham Palace, 00:15:26.110 --> 00:15:29.470 where Regent Street's going through Piccadilly Circus, 00:15:29.470 --> 00:15:32.110 runs into the Crown near [INAUDIBLE] area, 00:15:32.110 --> 00:15:33.380 is called Pall Mall. 00:15:36.380 --> 00:15:42.025 The place where American teenagers meet is a mall. 00:15:45.970 --> 00:15:51.430 Magliare la palla, Pall Mall, mall. 00:15:51.430 --> 00:16:04.250 The Cours la Reine in Paris became as Marie de' Medici 00:16:04.250 --> 00:16:09.260 built it, who was responsible for its construction, 00:16:09.260 --> 00:16:17.960 became a place where French could meet in their carriages 00:16:17.960 --> 00:16:23.960 and have flirtations with other members of either the same sex 00:16:23.960 --> 00:16:26.450 or the opposite sex. 00:16:26.450 --> 00:16:28.200 Essentially, it was a-- 00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:35.960 it took an idea of a street as an environment for play 00:16:35.960 --> 00:16:43.785 and transformed it into another version of the same idea. 00:16:46.450 --> 00:16:51.330 So the streets of Paris played almost every role 00:16:51.330 --> 00:16:53.130 you can imagine. 00:16:53.130 --> 00:17:00.150 This is, linguistically, an interesting reach, 00:17:00.150 --> 00:17:02.880 from closing a street in Florence 00:17:02.880 --> 00:17:09.030 to play a game to use the same word etymologically, 00:17:09.030 --> 00:17:10.980 now being used for-- 00:17:10.980 --> 00:17:14.480 to describe an American shopping center. 00:17:14.480 --> 00:17:15.520 Any connection? 00:17:19.810 --> 00:17:20.560 I don't know. 00:17:20.560 --> 00:17:22.329 Nor I've seen this explained. 00:17:26.210 --> 00:17:30.960 Perhaps the mall became a general term, 00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:36.210 and the Americans picked it up and applied it indiscriminantly 00:17:36.210 --> 00:17:37.890 of its origin. 00:17:37.890 --> 00:17:38.910 Absolutely. 00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:51.830 Well, the Romans crossed the river, as they did in London, 00:17:51.830 --> 00:17:55.580 but found an island about 20 acres large 00:17:55.580 --> 00:17:59.390 in the center of the river which became the foundation 00:17:59.390 --> 00:18:03.320 of the city of Paris. 00:18:03.320 --> 00:18:13.030 The Romans stayed until about the fifth century. 00:18:13.030 --> 00:18:15.280 One of the governors of the Romans was-- 00:18:15.280 --> 00:18:18.090 had my name. 00:18:18.090 --> 00:18:19.570 He was a cousin-- 00:18:19.570 --> 00:18:23.340 he was a nephew of the Emperor Constantine. 00:18:23.340 --> 00:18:26.980 He then became the last of the Roman emperors. 00:18:26.980 --> 00:18:30.430 He was killed by his own troops because he 00:18:30.430 --> 00:18:34.510 was unlike his uncle or a Christian. 00:18:34.510 --> 00:18:39.190 He believed in stemming the Christian epidemic 00:18:39.190 --> 00:18:46.300 and wanted Rome to remain in touch with the Mithrian rights 00:18:46.300 --> 00:18:53.440 and multigods and systems of religion, which was being 00:18:53.440 --> 00:18:55.540 sabotaged by Christianity. 00:19:01.840 --> 00:19:04.660 I'm just going to go through some 00:19:04.660 --> 00:19:11.620 of the aspects of this spatial system is put into place. 00:19:15.760 --> 00:19:26.390 Philippe August, 1180 to 1223, built on the Ile de Cité, 00:19:26.390 --> 00:19:28.070 the island. 00:19:28.070 --> 00:19:33.020 He built a palace, the beginning of the Louvre, 00:19:33.020 --> 00:19:40.720 the law courts, the bishop's palace, Ile de Cite, 00:19:40.720 --> 00:19:43.330 all on the 20 acres. 00:19:43.330 --> 00:19:44.695 He built the second wall. 00:19:47.450 --> 00:19:53.540 He already agitated for the rebuilding of Les Halles. 00:19:53.540 --> 00:19:58.030 Les Halles, the land of Les Halles 00:19:58.030 --> 00:20:01.510 was developed and occupied by Jews. 00:20:01.510 --> 00:20:04.630 In the 12th century, it was common to be-- 00:20:04.630 --> 00:20:10.700 for kings to be anti-Semitic. 00:20:10.700 --> 00:20:13.670 The Jews were expelled from their property, 00:20:13.670 --> 00:20:16.490 and Les Halles was built. So when you go to Les Halles 00:20:16.490 --> 00:20:19.850 today, which are now an underground shopping center, 00:20:19.850 --> 00:20:25.470 you'll have to think back to understand that it was land 00:20:25.470 --> 00:20:27.290 from which Jews were expelled. 00:20:27.290 --> 00:20:30.170 In England, at the same time, Jews 00:20:30.170 --> 00:20:33.500 had to wear a badge to show themselves as 00:20:33.500 --> 00:20:35.660 different from ordinary people. 00:20:35.660 --> 00:20:39.320 They had to pay tax when they entered or left London. 00:20:39.320 --> 00:20:42.710 And Henry II, I think it was. 00:20:42.710 --> 00:20:51.110 So the behavior of the French King 00:20:51.110 --> 00:20:56.980 was in sync, synchronized with the behavior of his colleagues 00:20:56.980 --> 00:20:59.590 out in Europe. 00:20:59.590 --> 00:21:03.040 Notre Dame was built in the 12th century. 00:21:03.040 --> 00:21:07.990 So centered is Paris in the geography of France 00:21:07.990 --> 00:21:11.950 that, even today, all measurements in France 00:21:11.950 --> 00:21:13.550 measured from Notre Dame. 00:21:17.960 --> 00:21:21.560 There isn't that sense of centrality in the London. 00:21:24.490 --> 00:21:30.100 There were crowds gathered to watch a hanging, 00:21:30.100 --> 00:21:32.800 but nothing like the crowds which 00:21:32.800 --> 00:21:37.750 gathered to watch the guillotine and to watch people be headed, 00:21:37.750 --> 00:21:40.000 to wath cats being fried. 00:21:48.900 --> 00:21:57.660 The great King Henry IV, a 16th century king 00:21:57.660 --> 00:21:59.880 whose second wife Marie de' Medici 00:21:59.880 --> 00:22:04.530 I've mentioned already in relation to Cours la Reine, 00:22:04.530 --> 00:22:11.550 he built a large section of the central part of Paris, bridges, 00:22:11.550 --> 00:22:18.330 palaces, churches, gardens. 00:22:18.330 --> 00:22:20.250 He built the Pont Neuf. 00:22:20.250 --> 00:22:22.500 He also built the Place Royale, which 00:22:22.500 --> 00:22:26.460 is the largest residential square in Europe 00:22:26.460 --> 00:22:33.720 and the predictor of the Covent Garden model. 00:22:33.720 --> 00:22:38.670 The Cours la Reine, at least the Place Royale, 00:22:38.670 --> 00:22:41.940 which is now the Place des Vosges, 00:22:41.940 --> 00:22:45.110 is 140 meters, if I remember correctly, 00:22:45.110 --> 00:22:48.630 140 meters by 140 meters. 00:22:48.630 --> 00:22:53.910 It's the largest residential public space in Europe, 00:22:53.910 --> 00:23:05.340 built as the residence for the royalty and the aristocracy. 00:23:12.670 --> 00:23:22.175 A number of attributes of the street system were reinforced-- 00:23:22.175 --> 00:23:23.430 oh, let me just-- 00:23:35.400 --> 00:23:38.040 just want the correct quotation. 00:23:40.590 --> 00:23:45.930 "On April the 10th, 1783, the first royal declaration 00:23:45.930 --> 00:23:49.530 of an urban policy was promulgated. 00:23:49.530 --> 00:23:53.220 It was worth noting that it followed an accurate map." 00:23:56.240 --> 00:24:03.190 Turgot, he made the first correct map of Paris. 00:24:03.190 --> 00:24:06.960 It was correct in the sense that it was more accurate 00:24:06.960 --> 00:24:14.610 than the typical perspective view of cities up to that time. 00:24:14.610 --> 00:24:20.910 The Great Map of Rome by Nolli was 1748. 00:24:20.910 --> 00:24:27.060 And Turgot did as best he could. 00:24:27.060 --> 00:24:32.880 The great first orthographic map of Paris 00:24:32.880 --> 00:24:40.200 was the work of a Burgundian architect called Verniquet. 00:24:40.200 --> 00:24:50.270 Verniquet took accurate measurements 00:24:50.270 --> 00:24:53.630 during the day in the crowded Paris streets. 00:24:53.630 --> 00:24:57.110 His grand observations were corrected by triangulation 00:24:57.110 --> 00:25:01.520 to determine the elevations of the city. 00:25:01.520 --> 00:25:06.290 In 1783, there's an interesting connection 00:25:06.290 --> 00:25:11.210 between the availability of an accurate map and the capacity 00:25:11.210 --> 00:25:14.300 to make a pronouncement of urban policy. 00:25:18.260 --> 00:25:26.380 The streets are important for the public welfare. 00:25:26.380 --> 00:25:29.950 They ought to be sufficiently wide and free of any barriers 00:25:29.950 --> 00:25:35.920 to the free and easy passage of vehicles and pedestrians. 00:25:35.920 --> 00:25:39.650 They further asserted that overly tall buildings 00:25:39.650 --> 00:25:45.040 were prejudicial to clean air in a city as populous as Paris 00:25:45.040 --> 00:25:49.600 as well as contrary to public safety and prone to fire. 00:25:49.600 --> 00:26:01.650 Already, in 1793, there was not only 00:26:01.650 --> 00:26:04.980 the ability to demarcate space accurately 00:26:04.980 --> 00:26:08.550 because of an accurate map, but the capacity 00:26:08.550 --> 00:26:11.820 to put into place regulations which 00:26:11.820 --> 00:26:15.180 decided what the dimensions of a street 00:26:15.180 --> 00:26:20.160 were and also of the ruling, which has lasted 00:26:20.160 --> 00:26:23.160 in central Paris ever since, and that 00:26:23.160 --> 00:26:25.980 is not to allow tall buildings. 00:26:34.770 --> 00:26:38.970 Whilst the spatial idea of having 00:26:38.970 --> 00:26:46.930 as direct a distance between two monumental points 00:26:46.930 --> 00:26:48.960 was an idea which had been around 00:26:48.960 --> 00:26:53.100 in French landscape for a long time, 00:26:53.100 --> 00:26:55.530 there was nobody, really, who could articulate 00:26:55.530 --> 00:26:56.715 that idea in practice. 00:27:00.620 --> 00:27:04.310 The street system was not only for play. 00:27:04.310 --> 00:27:07.340 It was for rapid movement. 00:27:07.340 --> 00:27:11.120 Denied by the building of barricades, 00:27:11.120 --> 00:27:14.690 the street system was also a sequence 00:27:14.690 --> 00:27:21.780 of connectivity between various aspects of the city. 00:27:21.780 --> 00:27:24.860 Already, early on, the French King 00:27:24.860 --> 00:27:28.430 decided that the university would be on the Left Bank 00:27:28.430 --> 00:27:31.620 and commerce would be on the Right Bank. 00:27:31.620 --> 00:27:40.400 But instead of developing these as the sole elements 00:27:40.400 --> 00:27:45.080 of the space, a system of avenues which connected 00:27:45.080 --> 00:27:50.360 the important points, often monuments, reticulated and made 00:27:50.360 --> 00:27:56.450 a multidimensional space, in this case, a box 00:27:56.450 --> 00:28:03.690 base of limited height but a compressed space, now 00:28:03.690 --> 00:28:09.860 of two million people, all articulated by the rulings 00:28:09.860 --> 00:28:12.620 about streets. 00:28:12.620 --> 00:28:22.360 Haussmann, who became prefect in 1851, 00:28:22.360 --> 00:28:30.740 was really responsible for being the first urban manager 00:28:30.740 --> 00:28:35.990 in any city in relatively recent times. 00:28:35.990 --> 00:28:38.540 What he did was take an idea which 00:28:38.540 --> 00:28:43.790 was in the DNA of the French Parisian system of streets 00:28:43.790 --> 00:28:46.160 and make it possible. 00:28:46.160 --> 00:28:51.560 Paris was an unruly medieval city. 00:28:51.560 --> 00:28:56.000 It was-- you read Stendhal, he talks 00:28:56.000 --> 00:29:00.630 about the mud in the streets and the filth in the streets. 00:29:00.630 --> 00:29:04.040 It was no different from most cities at that time. 00:29:08.390 --> 00:29:12.290 And it also was the site of cholera. 00:29:12.290 --> 00:29:17.420 There were great cholera epidemics in 1839 and in 1842. 00:29:17.420 --> 00:29:21.810 There were workers riots regularly 00:29:21.810 --> 00:29:25.670 in 1830s, the 1840s, this following 00:29:25.670 --> 00:29:33.080 that Great Revolution of 1789. 00:29:33.080 --> 00:29:37.320 Haussmann arrived after the failure 00:29:37.320 --> 00:29:42.110 of the last-- second-last king to maintain his position, 00:29:42.110 --> 00:29:45.320 and he was replaced by Louis Napoleon. 00:29:45.320 --> 00:29:50.420 Louis Napoleon had been in exile. 00:29:50.420 --> 00:29:57.380 And there are stories of him being in Durgin-Park, 00:29:57.380 --> 00:30:00.560 in the restaurant in Boston, talking 00:30:00.560 --> 00:30:03.170 about this great new city that he was going to build 00:30:03.170 --> 00:30:06.080 when he went back to Paris. 00:30:06.080 --> 00:30:08.560 He had watched Regent Street in London 00:30:08.560 --> 00:30:11.332 and, with great admiration for the-- 00:30:11.332 --> 00:30:14.870 what built Regent Street in London. 00:30:14.870 --> 00:30:19.790 The compact included permission by the Parliament, 00:30:19.790 --> 00:30:23.270 a million pounds of money from the bank, 00:30:23.270 --> 00:30:32.650 and the right to purchase property 00:30:32.650 --> 00:30:35.860 in order that the property may be transformed according 00:30:35.860 --> 00:30:36.880 to a street system. 00:30:39.480 --> 00:30:47.550 Louis Napoleon was obsessed with this idea 00:30:47.550 --> 00:30:50.910 that he could rebuild Paris. 00:30:50.910 --> 00:30:55.890 He happens to be the last king in the history of Paris. 00:30:55.890 --> 00:31:01.800 He made a bad decision to start a war with the Prussians, 00:31:01.800 --> 00:31:13.590 and Paris was bombarded and the court moved to Versailles 00:31:13.590 --> 00:31:18.090 and a republic was established after the war. 00:31:18.090 --> 00:31:23.040 So Haussmann's 20 years are 20 years 00:31:23.040 --> 00:31:32.010 at the end of 900 years of royal regime in Paris. 00:31:32.010 --> 00:31:38.610 You cannot account for a similar set of circumstances in London 00:31:38.610 --> 00:31:42.960 or in Vienna or in Berlin or any of the great European cities. 00:31:47.810 --> 00:31:54.760 Haussmann was a maniac for a number of things. 00:31:54.760 --> 00:31:58.150 Spatially, I don't know about his personal life here. 00:31:58.150 --> 00:32:00.090 That's another story altogether. 00:32:02.630 --> 00:32:06.800 He wanted absolute control. 00:32:06.800 --> 00:32:09.520 He says to the Emperor-- 00:32:09.520 --> 00:32:13.480 when they have the first meeting of the town planning commission 00:32:13.480 --> 00:32:15.640 and there are lots of speeches and everybody's 00:32:15.640 --> 00:32:17.290 sitting around-- 00:32:17.290 --> 00:32:19.330 he talks to the Emperor after the meeting 00:32:19.330 --> 00:32:22.420 and says, "What a waste of time. 00:32:22.420 --> 00:32:25.630 All these people like big speeches, and nothing happened. 00:32:25.630 --> 00:32:26.980 We don't get any work done." 00:32:26.980 --> 00:32:29.590 The Emperor says, "Well, how big does the commission 00:32:29.590 --> 00:32:30.670 have to be?" 00:32:30.670 --> 00:32:33.400 He says, "Well, the Emperor, you would have to be there 00:32:33.400 --> 00:32:37.120 and I have to be there, and I can't think of anybody else." 00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:40.330 The Emperor says, "Sounds like a good plan to me." 00:32:40.330 --> 00:32:45.820 So the commission becomes one man, the Prefect of the Seine. 00:32:45.820 --> 00:32:49.090 Rambuteau, the Prefect of the Seine before him-- 00:32:49.090 --> 00:32:52.990 there were a number of others, Berger and Persigny and so on-- 00:32:52.990 --> 00:32:59.980 but Rambuteau tried to extend the East-West access 00:32:59.980 --> 00:33:03.835 to the Bastille, as Napoleon tried to do, but failed. 00:33:06.910 --> 00:33:13.270 He proposed the street which has his name, the Rue Rambuteau, 00:33:13.270 --> 00:33:16.840 but could only afford to build it out 00:33:16.840 --> 00:33:20.260 of the budget of the city. 00:33:20.260 --> 00:33:27.700 He could build one mile, and he was allowed to make it. 00:33:27.700 --> 00:33:31.180 He only asked for 13 meters width. 00:33:31.180 --> 00:33:33.590 He was allowed 20 meters. 00:33:33.590 --> 00:33:37.210 But the story of Rambuteau is the story of the fact that you 00:33:37.210 --> 00:33:42.220 cannot do a major reconstruction of a city out of the capital 00:33:42.220 --> 00:33:44.800 budget of the city. 00:33:44.800 --> 00:33:49.950 What the greatest invention of Haussmann, 00:33:49.950 --> 00:33:54.270 it was not easy arrangement, but economists like Saint-Simon 00:33:54.270 --> 00:34:02.640 constructed the idea that if you improved an asset, its worth, 00:34:02.640 --> 00:34:05.820 no matter how much you invest in the improvement, 00:34:05.820 --> 00:34:09.285 its worth in the end is going to pay it back many times. 00:34:11.830 --> 00:34:15.310 It's called deficit spending, today. 00:34:15.310 --> 00:34:17.620 And Haussmann understood that in order 00:34:17.620 --> 00:34:25.630 to rebuild Paris from being a medieval slum to a modern city, 00:34:25.630 --> 00:34:29.020 you needed to develop more capital 00:34:29.020 --> 00:34:33.159 than the ordinary taxation system in the city can do. 00:34:37.670 --> 00:34:45.730 So he took the money from the octroi system, borrowed money. 00:34:45.730 --> 00:34:49.630 He expropriated land. 00:34:49.630 --> 00:34:56.219 In 1783-- no. 00:34:56.219 --> 00:35:02.790 Slowly, in the 18th century, the control of Paris by the kings 00:35:02.790 --> 00:35:04.440 diminished. 00:35:04.440 --> 00:35:07.080 And when the rule-- after the Revolution, of course, 00:35:07.080 --> 00:35:10.615 there were no kings until Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon. 00:35:13.800 --> 00:35:21.480 The notion that you could move people out of their domains, 00:35:21.480 --> 00:35:26.370 rebuild the premises in which they lived, and not 00:35:26.370 --> 00:35:31.810 care for them through replacement accommodation 00:35:31.810 --> 00:35:35.340 and so on, took hold under Haussmann. 00:35:35.340 --> 00:35:38.730 Haussmann, in 20 years, rebuilt Paris 00:35:38.730 --> 00:35:44.430 in ways which were part of the DNA street system of Paris 00:35:44.430 --> 00:35:50.805 and made possible, in modern times, by deficit spending. 00:35:53.830 --> 00:35:56.820 The loans which Haussmann accumulated 00:35:56.820 --> 00:36:03.030 in the 20 years where only repaid in 1929, 00:36:03.030 --> 00:36:09.030 but Paris was an immensely more valuable city in 1929 00:36:09.030 --> 00:36:14.110 than it was in 1850. 00:36:14.110 --> 00:36:20.520 So we have the introduction into the urban system of a business 00:36:20.520 --> 00:36:25.020 model, of a management model. 00:36:25.020 --> 00:36:28.290 Haussmann had his own predilections. 00:36:28.290 --> 00:36:30.930 He did not believe that individual buildings 00:36:30.930 --> 00:36:32.190 were important. 00:36:32.190 --> 00:36:35.590 He believed that the systems of building were important. 00:36:35.590 --> 00:36:39.030 He hated the idiosyncrasy. 00:36:39.030 --> 00:36:42.150 All the buildings had to be the same height. 00:36:42.150 --> 00:36:46.200 There's an image in what I gave you. 00:36:46.200 --> 00:36:52.590 There's a photograph of a street in Paris 00:36:52.590 --> 00:36:59.250 where he forces the property on the left 00:36:59.250 --> 00:37:03.540 to shift its turret to the street in order 00:37:03.540 --> 00:37:06.572 that it balance a building on the opposite side 00:37:06.572 --> 00:37:07.155 of the street. 00:37:11.250 --> 00:37:12.780 What else? 00:37:12.780 --> 00:37:16.500 This is an enormously long story, 00:37:16.500 --> 00:37:19.270 but I'm giving you the bounds of it. 00:37:19.270 --> 00:37:22.650 If you're interested, there's good literature 00:37:22.650 --> 00:37:25.050 on the history of Paris and certainly 00:37:25.050 --> 00:37:36.590 the period of 1850 to 1870. 00:37:36.590 --> 00:37:42.330 What else can I say before we look at some images? 00:37:42.330 --> 00:37:45.200 This is about as bare a description of Paris 00:37:45.200 --> 00:37:48.810 as I can imagine. 00:37:48.810 --> 00:37:53.000 But the extraordinary capacity for the street system 00:37:53.000 --> 00:37:58.640 to be the major articulator of movement, of war, 00:37:58.640 --> 00:38:10.200 of play, of distribution, of psychogeography, 00:38:10.200 --> 00:38:14.160 Haussmann felt that if you look down an avenue, 00:38:14.160 --> 00:38:17.640 you had to have a closed vista. 00:38:17.640 --> 00:38:22.110 You had to be led to something which was an important place. 00:38:22.110 --> 00:38:28.760 In Washington, which has a kind of Parisian kind of plan, 00:38:28.760 --> 00:38:33.620 the intersections of the diagonal avenues, 00:38:33.620 --> 00:38:36.335 where they meet each other, produce nothing. 00:38:38.980 --> 00:38:42.550 In Paris, there's always an important square or monument. 00:38:42.550 --> 00:38:51.060 When Haussmann decides that we-- that the city needs an opera, 00:38:51.060 --> 00:38:55.920 he builds the Rue de Opera and then the opera itself. 00:38:55.920 --> 00:39:00.690 The opera, it has an extraordinary interior. 00:39:00.690 --> 00:39:05.430 Adding to the complexity of the spatial relationship of access 00:39:05.430 --> 00:39:07.020 to the opera-- 00:39:07.020 --> 00:39:10.530 the facade of the opera is a monument standing freely 00:39:10.530 --> 00:39:11.640 in space-- 00:39:11.640 --> 00:39:18.090 and then the entrance and interior, a fantastic interior, 00:39:18.090 --> 00:39:21.050 as well. 00:39:21.050 --> 00:39:25.340 What you have in this Haussmannian system 00:39:25.340 --> 00:39:32.690 is this state set of multifunctional connectors 00:39:32.690 --> 00:39:36.200 tying decentralized aspects of it. 00:39:36.200 --> 00:39:38.902 There's no center to Paris. 00:39:38.902 --> 00:39:39.860 There are many centers. 00:39:45.350 --> 00:39:50.920 You have, as you'll see in some of the slides, 00:39:50.920 --> 00:39:55.610 passages connecting with covered roofs 00:39:55.610 --> 00:39:57.620 in between the boulevards. 00:40:03.520 --> 00:40:09.380 You have an articulate and very elementary system based, 00:40:09.380 --> 00:40:14.030 as I say, on of DNA of Paris since the 15th century. 00:40:14.030 --> 00:40:19.550 Why the French articulated their space 00:40:19.550 --> 00:40:24.080 around the idea of minimizing distance between points 00:40:24.080 --> 00:40:28.370 and being articulate about that distance and the experience 00:40:28.370 --> 00:40:33.050 of that distance is still, to me, unclear. 00:40:33.050 --> 00:40:38.820 But it's absolutely different from the case of London, 00:40:38.820 --> 00:40:41.340 where we have one street, Regent Street, 00:40:41.340 --> 00:40:46.290 artifacted in a similar pathway. 00:40:46.290 --> 00:40:49.080 As Haussmann did it, the scale of a city. 00:40:52.800 --> 00:40:57.670 I need to see if there's anything else I should say. 00:40:57.670 --> 00:41:01.360 Any questions? 00:41:01.360 --> 00:41:03.910 STUDENT: If I understood what you said earlier, 00:41:03.910 --> 00:41:09.730 it was that the idea of a street or a path connecting monuments 00:41:09.730 --> 00:41:13.420 is like an older idea than Haussmann. 00:41:13.420 --> 00:41:15.550 If I understood you correctly, like, where 00:41:15.550 --> 00:41:18.280 did that originate from, like in Paris or in French culture? 00:41:18.280 --> 00:41:19.840 JULIAN BEINART: Well, I don't know. 00:41:19.840 --> 00:41:21.700 As you'll see, in the second slide I 00:41:21.700 --> 00:41:28.330 will show you of an image of streets in the 15th century-- 00:41:28.330 --> 00:41:29.360 oh, it's later. 00:41:29.360 --> 00:41:32.590 It's probably 17th century Paris. 00:41:32.590 --> 00:41:34.870 You will see diagonal road systems 00:41:34.870 --> 00:41:38.260 in these rural areas around Paris 00:41:38.260 --> 00:41:41.740 as well as in some in Paris itself. 00:41:41.740 --> 00:41:44.980 When I talk about the DNA of a city, 00:41:44.980 --> 00:41:48.680 I don't know exactly what I'm saying. 00:41:48.680 --> 00:41:52.960 It's a biological explanation, assuming 00:41:52.960 --> 00:41:57.700 that there are repetitive elements, significant elements 00:41:57.700 --> 00:42:00.340 in a culture, which repeat. 00:42:00.340 --> 00:42:03.850 Often, we don't quite know why. 00:42:03.850 --> 00:42:06.100 I often think that the French are probably 00:42:06.100 --> 00:42:09.430 more direct than anybody else philosophically 00:42:09.430 --> 00:42:13.210 and probably decided, like Bismarck did, 00:42:13.210 --> 00:42:18.550 that the way to fight a war is to go in a straight line 00:42:18.550 --> 00:42:21.460 because you'll find nobody else on the straight line. 00:42:21.460 --> 00:42:26.200 Everybody else is fussing around all over the place. 00:42:26.200 --> 00:42:31.600 It's the direct avenue to accomplish 00:42:31.600 --> 00:42:35.970 the friction of distance. 00:42:35.970 --> 00:42:39.810 I can't-- I wish I could answer it. 00:42:39.810 --> 00:42:42.810 I'm sure a French, if we had a French scholar here 00:42:42.810 --> 00:42:47.220 or a French historian, there may be a-- 00:42:47.220 --> 00:42:54.060 I've often looked for an answer, but I haven't found it. 00:42:54.060 --> 00:42:58.980 It's interesting to raise that question 00:42:58.980 --> 00:43:02.010 because, now, two million people are living 00:43:02.010 --> 00:43:07.330 in this precious construction, and six million people are 00:43:07.330 --> 00:43:11.950 living in bungalows, in public housing, because public housing 00:43:11.950 --> 00:43:15.790 was not asserted as an element to be incorporated 00:43:15.790 --> 00:43:17.830 into the Haussmannian puzzle. 00:43:20.810 --> 00:43:25.280 The city now has this empty sprawl, 00:43:25.280 --> 00:43:27.890 which everybody dislikes. 00:43:27.890 --> 00:43:34.540 And Sarkozy says, I need to do something about it. 00:43:40.030 --> 00:43:43.720 I don't know if you followed this competition. 00:43:43.720 --> 00:43:44.730 Did you? 00:43:44.730 --> 00:43:46.205 Did you see the results? 00:43:46.205 --> 00:43:48.372 STUDENT: I remember seeing some of these renderings, 00:43:48.372 --> 00:43:49.316 but I don't know. 00:43:49.316 --> 00:43:50.566 I don't know what's going to-- 00:43:50.566 --> 00:43:53.590 JULIAN BEINART: Oh, it was, I'm-- 00:43:53.590 --> 00:43:57.680 I don't know if there's a book of the entrants now available, 00:43:57.680 --> 00:44:01.870 but it was subject to a lot of publicity at the time. 00:44:01.870 --> 00:44:04.690 And the images I've just gathered here 00:44:04.690 --> 00:44:08.530 are taken from some of the publicity at the time. 00:44:15.050 --> 00:44:17.930 A number of things that one wants to say about this. 00:44:23.630 --> 00:44:32.760 Everybody acknowledges that the way to enlarge-- 00:44:32.760 --> 00:44:36.610 not to enlarge, to fill the space, 00:44:36.610 --> 00:44:39.910 empty space around the concentrated city, 00:44:39.910 --> 00:44:42.020 is not to expand the city itself. 00:44:46.630 --> 00:44:52.020 None of the 10 entries in the competition which 00:44:52.020 --> 00:44:57.840 use streets, avenues, diagonalized systems 00:44:57.840 --> 00:45:00.600 as an extension of the Haussmannian grid. 00:45:12.330 --> 00:45:27.550 There are many attempts to do strong constructions, 00:45:27.550 --> 00:45:30.730 strong constructions meaning constructions 00:45:30.730 --> 00:45:34.620 which have a strong physical spatial dimension. 00:45:45.210 --> 00:45:52.270 For instance, Grumbach proposes that Paris will extend itself 00:45:52.270 --> 00:45:55.870 westward along with the Seine to accommodate something 00:45:55.870 --> 00:46:00.430 like 16 million people, arguing that every great city 00:46:00.430 --> 00:46:02.470 in the world is a port city and Paris 00:46:02.470 --> 00:46:04.000 should become a port city. 00:46:08.356 --> 00:46:11.926 A linear city of 16 miles-- 00:46:11.926 --> 00:46:15.875 or 16 million people would take about an hour by public transit 00:46:15.875 --> 00:46:20.030 or fast train from Paris to Rouen. 00:46:23.240 --> 00:46:24.735 And it's a strong idea. 00:46:27.500 --> 00:46:32.180 You can imagine a city like this, following 00:46:32.180 --> 00:46:39.340 this pattern and developing interesting relationships 00:46:39.340 --> 00:46:43.790 between public transportation along the water 00:46:43.790 --> 00:46:45.380 and many aspects of it. 00:46:48.210 --> 00:46:52.620 What will stop it from developing 00:46:52.620 --> 00:46:58.200 the same condition of sprawl as now exists, I don't know. 00:46:58.200 --> 00:47:01.350 He doesn't detail very much about anything other 00:47:01.350 --> 00:47:05.250 than the concept itself. 00:47:05.250 --> 00:47:07.380 There are some crazy propositions. 00:47:07.380 --> 00:47:10.890 The one is to take, just close the Gare du Nord 00:47:10.890 --> 00:47:14.760 and shift the Gare do Nord into the Banlieues 00:47:14.760 --> 00:47:18.510 and have it as the premier railway station in Europe. 00:47:24.260 --> 00:47:26.900 Richard Rogers, the British architect, 00:47:26.900 --> 00:47:29.120 has a modest proposal. 00:47:29.120 --> 00:47:32.510 He's really interested in the the politics 00:47:32.510 --> 00:47:35.660 of all of the groups in the Banlieues 00:47:35.660 --> 00:47:38.710 and how they could be brought together. 00:47:38.710 --> 00:47:43.480 He extends some of the radial system, 00:47:43.480 --> 00:47:47.430 but covers them with green-- 00:47:47.430 --> 00:47:50.430 remember that the computation was called 00:47:50.430 --> 00:47:54.000 for post-Kyoto Resolution. 00:47:54.000 --> 00:47:58.770 Post-Kyoto means that the ecological consequences 00:47:58.770 --> 00:48:03.440 of the plan were important. 00:48:03.440 --> 00:48:06.660 Jean Nouvel, for instance-- 00:48:06.660 --> 00:48:17.010 many of the competitors proposed to cover all the buildings 00:48:17.010 --> 00:48:22.530 with sun collectors, energy collectors from the sun. 00:48:22.530 --> 00:48:26.830 Jean Nouvel says, all of the housing, 00:48:26.830 --> 00:48:32.010 public housing built in the Banlieues 00:48:32.010 --> 00:48:34.200 are just bad buildings. 00:48:34.200 --> 00:48:38.070 They just can't keep them and convert them 00:48:38.070 --> 00:48:44.400 in as interesting and dramatic and up-to-date 00:48:44.400 --> 00:48:47.700 fashion as possible. 00:48:47.700 --> 00:48:50.710 He says silly things like, "Paris 00:48:50.710 --> 00:48:55.640 must become the great art center of the world again." 00:48:55.640 --> 00:48:58.650 He proposes something on the Ile de Cité which I 00:48:58.650 --> 00:48:59.820 can't understand. 00:49:02.790 --> 00:49:09.360 There's almost a sense of tiredness about the scheme, 00:49:09.360 --> 00:49:12.900 as if there isn't really a formula 00:49:12.900 --> 00:49:15.735 anymore for making urban space. 00:49:18.770 --> 00:49:25.670 Haussmann has really terminated 900 years 00:49:25.670 --> 00:49:32.570 of French royal effort to build walls, to build monuments. 00:49:39.410 --> 00:49:43.400 Imagine having a monument in the center of a city which 00:49:43.400 --> 00:49:49.710 was built by the first king and then torn down and rebuilt 00:49:49.710 --> 00:49:52.080 by the second king and then rebuilt and rebuilt 00:49:52.080 --> 00:49:55.800 and rebuilt and rebuilt as the Paris-- 00:49:55.800 --> 00:50:03.970 as a palace, ending up with I.M. Pei doing 00:50:03.970 --> 00:50:07.960 a kind of central focal point for it after it 00:50:07.960 --> 00:50:11.035 becomes a museum after a thousand years of palace. 00:50:13.670 --> 00:50:15.560 It's the largest museum in the world, 00:50:15.560 --> 00:50:22.460 I think, and certainly probably the most significant. 00:50:22.460 --> 00:50:24.350 Yet it's on the River Seine. 00:50:24.350 --> 00:50:26.930 It blocks access to the river. 00:50:26.930 --> 00:50:32.390 It's a big block of something or other. 00:50:32.390 --> 00:50:35.630 It's as permanent as the city, and there's 00:50:35.630 --> 00:50:39.236 no moving it as many have. 00:50:39.236 --> 00:50:42.090 And there's, in a class later on, 00:50:42.090 --> 00:50:46.340 we look at temporary environments in cities. 00:50:46.340 --> 00:50:52.100 I will go through the various French five French exhibitions 00:50:52.100 --> 00:50:53.400 in the center of Paris. 00:50:53.400 --> 00:51:01.070 1855, four years after the Crystal Palace; 1868; 1879, 00:51:01.070 --> 00:51:04.820 I think; 1889; and 1900. 00:51:04.820 --> 00:51:07.115 1889, of course, the Eiffel Tower. 00:51:10.220 --> 00:51:13.580 Jean Giraudoux, the French playwright, 00:51:13.580 --> 00:51:20.810 talks about the center of Paris as being a stone site, 00:51:20.810 --> 00:51:27.440 a permanent, fixed, [INAUDIBLE] set of operations, 00:51:27.440 --> 00:51:30.620 and these temporary exhibitions are the sort 00:51:30.620 --> 00:51:32.850 of way of animating them. 00:51:32.850 --> 00:51:36.570 It's like a circus coming to small town once a year. 00:51:39.130 --> 00:51:41.200 It's an extraordinary idea, that a city 00:51:41.200 --> 00:51:45.730 could be fossilized in some sort of way, gaining 00:51:45.730 --> 00:51:48.190 in prestige, becoming the greatest tourist 00:51:48.190 --> 00:51:51.280 city of the world. 00:51:51.280 --> 00:51:56.170 Why is Paris the greatest tourist city of the world? 00:51:56.170 --> 00:51:58.900 What is there about its spatial strategy 00:51:58.900 --> 00:52:06.600 that I've tried to spend an hour talking about that 00:52:06.600 --> 00:52:09.180 makes it so attractive? 00:52:09.180 --> 00:52:18.120 Is it everybody's last opportunity somehow? 00:52:18.120 --> 00:52:21.600 It's the last construction of cities 00:52:21.600 --> 00:52:27.030 that made sense to people, that you knew where you were, 00:52:27.030 --> 00:52:30.030 that it had an enormous degree of relatability, 00:52:30.030 --> 00:52:32.670 much like Manhattan. 00:52:32.670 --> 00:52:36.510 Manhattan's plan is as naive, perhaps, 00:52:36.510 --> 00:52:40.140 as linking a bunch of nodal points with streets. 00:52:43.440 --> 00:52:44.850 Any thought about that? 00:52:47.380 --> 00:52:51.010 Finn Geipel's plan in the computation 00:52:51.010 --> 00:52:54.820 is an MIT kind of plan. 00:52:54.820 --> 00:52:59.410 He was, three years, a visiting professor 00:52:59.410 --> 00:53:01.750 before the competition. 00:53:01.750 --> 00:53:10.660 It's a kind of eco-friendly city with no particular form, 00:53:10.660 --> 00:53:14.170 high degrees of-- 00:53:14.170 --> 00:53:17.980 there's low visibility, but high degrees of communication 00:53:17.980 --> 00:53:20.800 through telephones, through all kinds 00:53:20.800 --> 00:53:24.250 of modern electronic conveniences. 00:53:28.640 --> 00:53:31.180 What am I saying? 00:53:31.180 --> 00:53:34.130 Am I arguing that we have lost a formula for doing 00:53:34.130 --> 00:53:36.530 things which have impact? 00:53:36.530 --> 00:53:40.145 All we do is build taller buildings with funnier shapes. 00:53:46.605 --> 00:53:49.280 STUDENT: This doesn't answer your question, 00:53:49.280 --> 00:53:54.572 but it's something that I'm needing to go back to. 00:53:54.572 --> 00:53:56.780 When Haussmann, and you were talking about that being 00:53:56.780 --> 00:54:00.650 in the DNA of Paris, the idea, on things I've always thought 00:54:00.650 --> 00:54:05.150 about Haussmann that never seems to get talked about as much is 00:54:05.150 --> 00:54:10.130 the relationship of those streets to the medieval streets 00:54:10.130 --> 00:54:10.890 and how it's-- 00:54:10.890 --> 00:54:12.756 I mean that's like the big difference or one 00:54:12.756 --> 00:54:14.631 of the differences between how the city works 00:54:14.631 --> 00:54:17.155 and how Haussmann's intervention in Cairos works 00:54:17.155 --> 00:54:22.640 is Haussmann's streets work in a context of the preexisting 00:54:22.640 --> 00:54:25.340 streets, versus just laying those down 00:54:25.340 --> 00:54:29.710 and that being your whole strategy for having a city. 00:54:29.710 --> 00:54:30.585 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 00:54:33.360 --> 00:54:37.380 You'll see, on some of the slides, some plans 00:54:37.380 --> 00:54:44.670 of the Haussmann roads impacting the existing medieval texture. 00:54:44.670 --> 00:54:46.670 It's pretty ruthless. 00:54:46.670 --> 00:54:50.490 I mean, you know, there's no-- 00:54:50.490 --> 00:54:51.240 STUDENT: But the-- 00:54:51.240 --> 00:54:54.900 JULIAN BEINART: --notion that the people 00:54:54.900 --> 00:55:00.720 who live under the system, there's no replacement. 00:55:00.720 --> 00:55:07.560 They pay a marginal penalty for acquiring the land, 00:55:07.560 --> 00:55:08.505 but there's no-- 00:55:11.760 --> 00:55:16.320 urban renewal, in this country, produced no great evocative 00:55:16.320 --> 00:55:17.500 features either. 00:55:20.880 --> 00:55:23.580 My point-- it's rather a nasty point-- 00:55:23.580 --> 00:55:26.490 is that if you're going to be brutal, 00:55:26.490 --> 00:55:28.680 at least produce something worthwhile. 00:55:28.680 --> 00:55:30.540 [LAUGHTER] 00:55:30.540 --> 00:55:36.030 If you're going to be nasty, do it to some effect. 00:55:36.030 --> 00:55:40.110 It's a horrible principle in modern life 00:55:40.110 --> 00:55:45.780 where we are inclined to not give power. 00:55:45.780 --> 00:55:52.290 I mean, Haussmann construed the rules 00:55:52.290 --> 00:55:55.950 so that it was possible for the Prefect 00:55:55.950 --> 00:56:00.180 of the Seine, the chief management officer of the city, 00:56:00.180 --> 00:56:05.220 to decide which property could be confiscated. 00:56:05.220 --> 00:56:09.150 There was no such ruling ever in England, and certainly not 00:56:09.150 --> 00:56:13.380 in the United States, under urban renewal. 00:56:13.380 --> 00:56:17.730 But I'm trying to make the argument that we 00:56:17.730 --> 00:56:20.310 are in a different time. 00:56:20.310 --> 00:56:24.190 We have different commodities to work with. 00:56:24.190 --> 00:56:25.680 But there's a sense that-- 00:56:30.460 --> 00:56:31.690 I know. 00:56:31.690 --> 00:56:35.050 I mean, the critique of Haussmann's plan by architects 00:56:35.050 --> 00:56:41.140 has been fairly general and quite right in many respects. 00:56:41.140 --> 00:56:45.790 Richard [INAUDIBLE] argument against the subdivision 00:56:45.790 --> 00:56:49.390 of the Arondissement by Haussmann 00:56:49.390 --> 00:56:56.110 in the political units and the Banlieues being left alone, 00:56:56.110 --> 00:56:57.070 yeah. 00:56:57.070 --> 00:57:04.270 I mean, perhaps I'm talking about a lost nostalgia 00:57:04.270 --> 00:57:10.720 for a lost unity which we've now dispatched 00:57:10.720 --> 00:57:14.950 in favor of a greater sense of well-being about all people. 00:57:18.180 --> 00:57:23.880 I don't know if you saw a movie called La Haine, The Hate, 00:57:23.880 --> 00:57:28.815 by an American director, I think Arthur Moskovitz. 00:57:28.815 --> 00:57:30.120 STUDENT: Mathieu Kassovitz. 00:57:30.120 --> 00:57:32.430 JULIAN BEINART: Mathieu Kassovitz. 00:57:32.430 --> 00:57:33.750 Do you remember the movie? 00:57:33.750 --> 00:57:35.340 STUDENT: Yeah, I'm a fan. 00:57:35.340 --> 00:57:39.300 JULIAN BEINART: It's an extraordinary movie. 00:57:39.300 --> 00:57:44.640 It follows a group of young men from the Banlieues, 00:57:44.640 --> 00:57:48.480 where they are surrounded by sculpture in public place 00:57:48.480 --> 00:57:53.320 in this rather dismal new town. 00:57:53.320 --> 00:57:57.930 They venture into Paris, into the heart of the Old City, 00:57:57.930 --> 00:58:02.490 and start destroying environments. 00:58:02.490 --> 00:58:05.610 They go into cocktail parties and drink all the wine. 00:58:08.240 --> 00:58:12.800 They become just an intolerable nuisance. 00:58:12.800 --> 00:58:17.190 And one of them is killed. 00:58:17.190 --> 00:58:20.030 I don't remember how he dies, but-- 00:58:20.030 --> 00:58:20.712 do you remember? 00:58:20.712 --> 00:58:21.920 STUDENT: That's the very end. 00:58:21.920 --> 00:58:24.530 He gets shot by a cop, but that's actually back 00:58:24.530 --> 00:58:25.310 in the Banlieues. 00:58:25.310 --> 00:58:26.840 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 00:58:26.840 --> 00:58:30.440 For those of you who know Henri Lefebvre's work, 00:58:30.440 --> 00:58:35.570 the right to the town is exemplified by that. 00:58:35.570 --> 00:58:42.440 If you have two distinct towns, if you grow up 00:58:42.440 --> 00:58:47.920 on the wrong side of the railroad, 00:58:47.920 --> 00:58:53.530 you are disestablished in your right to the town. 00:58:53.530 --> 00:58:58.540 In Paris, which becomes more and more expensive, more and more, 00:58:58.540 --> 00:59:03.310 the great tourist center of the world building 00:59:03.310 --> 00:59:11.380 more and more museums, artifacts along the quay of the river, 00:59:11.380 --> 00:59:17.850 the curious quays of the river, the competition 00:59:17.850 --> 00:59:21.330 is not going to work. 00:59:21.330 --> 00:59:28.170 The competition for cities is a waste of time. 00:59:28.170 --> 00:59:32.580 The variables are too mentally complicated, too. 00:59:32.580 --> 00:59:37.530 City planning is not a unique-- a one sort of a time exercise. 00:59:37.530 --> 00:59:39.480 The only plan I know of a city that 00:59:39.480 --> 00:59:43.260 was any good as a competition, although it was never built, 00:59:43.260 --> 00:59:50.955 was the Green City competition in Russia, La Ville Verte. 00:59:53.940 --> 00:59:56.250 Which we'll-- when we deal with Russia, 00:59:56.250 --> 01:00:01.095 we will spend some time talking, looking at that competition. 01:00:01.095 --> 01:00:10.560 But competitions are poor models for working 01:00:10.560 --> 01:00:14.370 through some of the issues we've talked about. 01:00:14.370 --> 01:00:17.310 No wonder none of these plans ever get to pass. 01:00:17.310 --> 01:00:21.810 Sarkozy's not president any longer. 01:00:21.810 --> 01:00:26.260 I don't know what's going to happen, if anything. 01:00:26.260 --> 01:00:27.900 Let's look at some of these images 01:00:27.900 --> 01:00:32.460 because they tell more of the story than my words. 01:00:32.460 --> 01:00:35.250 I hope somebody-- none of French history 01:00:35.250 --> 01:00:41.460 because I've been very irresponsible in plundering 01:00:41.460 --> 01:00:42.195 French history. 01:00:44.700 --> 01:00:50.530 Here's the Roman crossing and the Ile de la Cité and some 01:00:50.530 --> 01:00:54.210 images of the Bishop's palace. 01:00:54.210 --> 01:00:58.200 This is prior to Notre Dame, the law courts 01:00:58.200 --> 01:01:01.170 centering in the 20 acres, in the center, almost 01:01:01.170 --> 01:01:03.610 all the components of the earlier city. 01:01:03.610 --> 01:01:04.110 Next. 01:01:06.890 --> 01:01:10.510 Here are the diagrams that interest me. 01:01:10.510 --> 01:01:16.580 This is a 1750 plan of Paris and its surroundings. 01:01:16.580 --> 01:01:17.525 What are these things? 01:01:22.360 --> 01:01:24.880 These are hunting grounds. 01:01:24.880 --> 01:01:28.870 These, somebody once said to me that these are, 01:01:28.870 --> 01:01:32.860 if you designed a hunting environment, 01:01:32.860 --> 01:01:35.470 you would diagonalize the road and have 01:01:35.470 --> 01:01:38.350 many points of contact. 01:01:38.350 --> 01:01:42.190 This is Patte's-- 01:01:42.190 --> 01:01:46.930 Louis XIV, having emancipated himself from Paris, 01:01:46.930 --> 01:01:56.230 many of these kings, yeah, were alienated from their home city 01:01:56.230 --> 01:01:58.420 and left. 01:01:58.420 --> 01:02:04.930 Peter, the great tsar of Russia did as well. 01:02:04.930 --> 01:02:12.080 Here, you can see a plan which has as its principle 01:02:12.080 --> 01:02:16.510 a set of points, diagonals spreading, 01:02:16.510 --> 01:02:20.530 connecting to other points. 01:02:20.530 --> 01:02:31.363 The beginnings of a plan which suggest my argument of a DNA. 01:02:34.141 --> 01:02:36.980 Le Corbusier's Voisin plan for Paris 01:02:36.980 --> 01:02:39.830 has none of that spirit at all. 01:02:39.830 --> 01:02:45.560 It's a ruthless repositioning of modernism 01:02:45.560 --> 01:02:49.535 as against the canonical street system. 01:02:52.695 --> 01:02:53.195 Next. 01:02:58.936 --> 01:03:01.930 Well, these are just fairly obvious. 01:03:01.930 --> 01:03:05.230 It's interesting to contrast the plan of London. 01:03:05.230 --> 01:03:09.160 It's about the same scale as the plan of Paris. 01:03:09.160 --> 01:03:15.430 Paris circumvented by walls, one stretching further out 01:03:15.430 --> 01:03:16.690 than the other. 01:03:16.690 --> 01:03:27.960 London and being a free set of connected, loosely connected, 01:03:27.960 --> 01:03:34.380 villages, all encompassed much more spread-out system 01:03:34.380 --> 01:03:38.430 without the strong definitions given 01:03:38.430 --> 01:03:40.500 by these are the walls or the streets 01:03:40.500 --> 01:03:42.570 or the monuments in that city. 01:03:42.570 --> 01:03:45.330 This is not a monumental city at all. 01:03:45.330 --> 01:03:50.490 It's a sprawling, elegant microtuned environment. 01:03:50.490 --> 01:03:51.600 Next. 01:03:51.600 --> 01:03:57.240 Here are two images of streets in Florence being employed 01:03:57.240 --> 01:04:02.230 for games and Marie de' Medici's influence on the Cours la 01:04:02.230 --> 01:04:02.730 Reine. 01:04:02.730 --> 01:04:03.230 Next. 01:04:06.670 --> 01:04:14.050 The Cours la Reine on the left, a place for the wealthy to have 01:04:14.050 --> 01:04:19.412 sex in a broad sense of the word. 01:04:19.412 --> 01:04:21.770 [LAUGHTER] 01:04:22.115 --> 01:04:22.615 Next. 01:04:26.030 --> 01:04:29.930 The great adventure of perspective. 01:04:32.970 --> 01:04:36.350 The capacity for the middle class. 01:04:36.350 --> 01:04:38.790 This is Caillebotte's great painting. 01:04:38.790 --> 01:04:41.430 It's in, I think, in the Art Institute in Chicago. 01:04:46.220 --> 01:04:49.065 The use of this street with umbrellas. 01:04:49.065 --> 01:04:49.565 Next. 01:04:52.220 --> 01:05:00.780 The Place Royale, the great aristocratic center. 01:05:00.780 --> 01:05:04.240 The Place the Vosges on the right, today. 01:05:04.240 --> 01:05:04.740 Next. 01:05:10.765 --> 01:05:12.600 The Rue Rambuteau. 01:05:12.600 --> 01:05:18.810 Rambuteau's attempt to build a street 01:05:18.810 --> 01:05:22.180 without deficit financing help. 01:05:22.180 --> 01:05:22.680 Next. 01:05:25.950 --> 01:05:32.010 Haussmann and the dark black being 01:05:32.010 --> 01:05:39.500 the elements that he inserted into the revised system. 01:05:39.500 --> 01:05:40.000 Next. 01:05:44.090 --> 01:05:46.760 Here, you get the details of a-- 01:05:46.760 --> 01:05:48.550 this the Boulevard Sebastopol. 01:05:53.000 --> 01:05:58.800 That space is taken up at will. 01:05:58.800 --> 01:06:04.660 This connector, it doesn't matter that there 01:06:04.660 --> 01:06:06.590 are houses underneath here. 01:06:06.590 --> 01:06:11.510 The houses are just separated away from the others 01:06:11.510 --> 01:06:14.940 in order to make a new imposition. 01:06:14.940 --> 01:06:18.200 This is about as ruthless as-- 01:06:18.200 --> 01:06:24.440 and it's probably the last time in history 01:06:24.440 --> 01:06:28.200 that this is being able to be done in a democratic society. 01:06:31.655 --> 01:06:32.155 Next. 01:06:36.680 --> 01:06:41.410 Napoleon didn't pay much attention to Paris. 01:06:41.410 --> 01:06:44.410 He wanted to make Paris into a royal city. 01:06:44.410 --> 01:06:49.660 And the East-West access through the Champs-Élysées became his 01:06:49.660 --> 01:06:55.660 primary focus, the Arc de Triomphe being the connector-- 01:06:55.660 --> 01:07:01.900 not the connector-- being his great monument. 01:07:01.900 --> 01:07:06.640 He also attempted to stretch the Champs-Élysées eastward 01:07:06.640 --> 01:07:08.410 to the Bastille. 01:07:08.410 --> 01:07:12.520 It's an extraordinary Haussmannian device. 01:07:12.520 --> 01:07:15.130 This is the Avenue Fourche, which 01:07:15.130 --> 01:07:19.900 has the wealthiest real estate in Europe on the sides. 01:07:19.900 --> 01:07:23.710 This street is about 450 feet wide. 01:07:23.710 --> 01:07:28.150 That's about twice as wide as Commonwealth Avenue. 01:07:28.150 --> 01:07:31.540 And the Bois-- leading to the Bois de Boulogne, 01:07:31.540 --> 01:07:35.110 another one of Haussmann's creations. 01:07:35.110 --> 01:07:37.420 Here's the river. 01:07:37.420 --> 01:07:41.200 Here's the intersection of the Champs-Élysées into the Bois du 01:07:41.200 --> 01:07:43.415 Boulogne and the Avenue Fourche. 01:07:43.415 --> 01:07:43.915 Next. 01:07:55.378 --> 01:08:04.020 The Académie Nationale de Musique and the access to it, 01:08:04.020 --> 01:08:09.540 the monument at the end of the wide road, Avenue de l'Opera. 01:08:09.540 --> 01:08:12.030 Next. 01:08:12.030 --> 01:08:19.229 The interior of the opera by Garnier, an extraordinary-- 01:08:19.229 --> 01:08:24.149 Walter Benjamin writes about Paris and talks 01:08:24.149 --> 01:08:29.250 about the invention of the interior, the first time 01:08:29.250 --> 01:08:32.189 that the interior seen as significant. 01:08:32.189 --> 01:08:37.500 And this study is done by the students of Foucault, showing 01:08:37.500 --> 01:08:39.960 the subdivision of the French house 01:08:39.960 --> 01:08:45.240 over time, introducing what Benjamin calls 01:08:45.240 --> 01:08:49.750 the adventure of the interior. 01:08:49.750 --> 01:08:50.250 Next. 01:08:55.189 --> 01:08:58.700 Here is the ultimate. 01:08:58.700 --> 01:09:03.290 There's the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, 01:09:03.290 --> 01:09:09.830 the ultimate expression of destination and movement 01:09:09.830 --> 01:09:12.200 and the interior connections. 01:09:12.200 --> 01:09:13.580 Next. 01:09:13.580 --> 01:09:16.950 The underground services in the mid '90s, 01:09:16.950 --> 01:09:20.540 the cross-section of a Paris street. 01:09:20.540 --> 01:09:24.695 And during one of the exhibitions in Paris, 01:09:24.695 --> 01:09:30.810 a trip through the sewage system was a great pleasure. 01:09:33.800 --> 01:09:34.300 Next. 01:09:37.010 --> 01:09:41.960 The Banlieues, here is the taking down of the dues, 01:09:41.960 --> 01:09:45.930 tax houses on the-- 01:09:45.930 --> 01:09:50.569 where the octroi was collected and the conditions 01:09:50.569 --> 01:09:52.199 in the Banelieues. 01:09:52.199 --> 01:09:52.699 Next. 01:09:55.640 --> 01:09:56.990 In the street is war. 01:09:56.990 --> 01:10:02.140 1848, the barricaded streets in the center of-- 01:10:02.140 --> 01:10:03.110 on the east of-- 01:10:07.130 --> 01:10:11.030 on the east of Paris, here are the barricade lines. 01:10:16.200 --> 01:10:19.440 The use of this street is war. 01:10:23.210 --> 01:10:25.930 Next. 01:10:25.930 --> 01:10:29.620 1872, and the two-month-long occupation 01:10:29.620 --> 01:10:34.720 of the Western of the Eastern part of Paris, 01:10:34.720 --> 01:10:37.750 again, with the use of barricades. 01:10:37.750 --> 01:10:40.990 Barricades slow down troops, and people 01:10:40.990 --> 01:10:45.940 in the adjacent buildings can fire down on the troops 01:10:45.940 --> 01:10:47.440 when they slow down. 01:10:47.440 --> 01:10:49.850 Next. 01:10:49.850 --> 01:10:58.515 1968, and again the use of this street in protest. 01:10:58.515 --> 01:10:59.015 Next. 01:11:01.920 --> 01:11:03.470 OK.