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JULIAN BEINART: Let me go through the second set
of papers with you, which deal with today's class.
On the first page, is a diagram, two diagrams of Paris.
If London-- what are the major features of London
that we discussed on Tuesday?
The rights of citizens to control their own land.
Because they [INAUDIBLE] through the reign of Charles II.
Secondly, the decision to make transportation,
public transportation, a fundamental aspect
of the organization of the city leading to,
amongst others, to lower density.
Thirdly, the presence of the aristocracy
in the center of the city, subdividing to take
care of a rising middle-income middle class.
The rest are details.
The fire and the plague, just disasters
which brought about certain fundamental changes
such as the imposition of the new sewage system.
Paris is a very different city.
You've all been to Paris, so you know what I'm talking about,
I hope.
For reasons which are not clear to me, in the 18th century
already, in 1750, there was a competition
held by Louis XV, who was already safely ensconced
in Versailles, 18 miles from the center of Paris.
This is not a place to eat.
I'm sorry, Michaela.
It's difficult to have classes at lunchtime, but--
STUDENT: Sorry.
JULIAN BEINART: It's OK.
Is it cold or hot?
STUDENT: Cold.
JULIAN BEINART: Oh, so it'll last.
There was a competition to make the center of Paris resemble
Versailles.
It was won by a man called Patte, P-A-T-T-E.
And I will show the plan.
The elements of the plan establish
a number of fundamentals.
First of all, there are walls.
Look at the number of walls that encompass the city
from over the 900 years--
well, even more than the 900 years as a kingdom.
The first wall, in 1250--
the first wall in AD 250.
That was a Roman wall.
The Romans left, more or less, 500 AD.
The subsequent walls are the 12th century wall,
the 14th century wall, the 17th century wall,
the 18th century wall, the 19th century wall, the Périphérique.
You'll notice that whenever an enclosing wall
hits a main axis--
in this case, the Champs-Élysées--
there's an important place.
The Étoile, the Porte Maillot, the Place de la Concorde.
Paris has-- was built out of three fundamentals, streets,
walls, and--
there were three.
One is escaping for the moment.
Let's just continue through this.
The next page is the final step in the transformation
of the center of Paris by the work of Haussmann,
from about 1850 to 1872.
1872 marks the end of the kingdoms of Paris,
which started with in 987 AD.
And the third of the components that I was going to mention
were monuments.
Prime example of a monument which
persists from the beginning in the 12th century, added to
and transformed over time by kings and their queens giving
it its final shape through the work of Louis Napoleon III.
And then, finally, the Arc du Carrousel, the center
point being the work of an American architect.
The diagram below is from work and writing
by Guy Debord, which argues--
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn and Victor Constant,
all participants in the movement called the Situationists.
Situationists believed in something they
called psychogeography.
That was the system in which the experience of cities which
was not delimitated by simple boundaries.
This diagram indicates that the experience of Paris
is much to be made, not through the compartments designed,
administrative components designed
by Haussmann, but as a free system of movement,
much like a taxi ride moves through a city,
independent of boundaries.
There is a film which they referred
to which I can't remember.
It's a film of a French prostitute
who works freely in the city.
I tried.
I can't remember.
The next page indicates another use of the streets.
1848-- the two revolutions of 1848 and 1871,
the idea of the street as a system of barricades.
The next page is a section through the boulevard house.
This is a typical section in a Haussmann elevation, one, two,
three, four, five, floors, the fifth floor being the roof.
There's a pharmacy on the ground floor,
some commercial activity.
The first and second and third floors
are middle-class apartments, and the top floor
is where the artists [INAUDIBLE] La Boheme
and La Traviata and so on happened in the top floor.
This construction is one of the keys to the density of Paris.
Paris has always been dense.
It's attracted enormous amount-- it was the greatest
manufacturing city in the second half of the 19th century
and attracted immigrants.
Not national, not extranational immigrants,
but rural immigrants to the city between the period of 18--
oh.
We'll get there.
OK, I think that's the last of the pages.
The walls are interesting for a number of reasons.
They consume capital.
The last 19th century wall created a large space north
of the current Haussmann city.
Today, two million people live in the center of Paris
and six million people live in the Banlieues, which is
the suburban sprawl condition.
Which the competition, Sarkozy's competition of 19--
what are we?
Or 2008, which some example-- and we'll
go through some examples from that competition.
So, essentially, the other interesting aspect of the wall
was that it paid.
It brought in a lot of money to Haussmann's capacity
to engage in loans from banks to pay for the purchase of land
in order to divide--
[INAUDIBLE] his new road systems.
The octroi, O-C-T-R-O-I, was a major source of income.
Wine and food was taxed at the gate.
This is a device which is still common.
Robert Moses used the income because he controlled
the taxation system of transportation into New York
through the bridges and tunnels.
In Boston, we have the same silliness,
that we still pay tolls to the authority which
runs the Seaport, badly, and the airport.
It's an old system, paying at the gate.
So we want to look at 900 years of history,
and I'm just going to pick out some aspects of it
because, really, one-- this is an enormous topic.
And I want to concentrate on the spatial environmental issues
and relate them back historically.
So, for instance, Henry IV, one of the great kings
of Paris, 1533 to 1610, had a second wife
called Marie de' Medici.
There were two Medici women who were
important in these years in Paris.
She introduced another idea into the street system.
In Florence, streets were closed so
that people could play games.
The games were called, in Italian, magliare, to hit,
la palla, a ball.
Right?
STUDENT: Magliare?
JULIAN BEINART: Magliare.
Maglio is a hammer, isn't it?
STUDENT: Yeah.
Never heard, that one.
But, yeah, maglio is a hammer.
Yes.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, magliare la palla
is the phrase which is used to describe
the games they played like croquet, with hitting a ball.
There are versions of this game, obviously.
The area around Buckingham Palace,
where Regent Street's going through Piccadilly Circus,
runs into the Crown near [INAUDIBLE] area,
is called Pall Mall.
The place where American teenagers meet is a mall.
Magliare la palla, Pall Mall, mall.
The Cours la Reine in Paris became as Marie de' Medici
built it, who was responsible for its construction,
became a place where French could meet in their carriages
and have flirtations with other members of either the same sex
or the opposite sex.
Essentially, it was a--
it took an idea of a street as an environment for play
and transformed it into another version of the same idea.
So the streets of Paris played almost every role
you can imagine.
This is, linguistically, an interesting reach,
from closing a street in Florence
to play a game to use the same word etymologically,
now being used for--
to describe an American shopping center.
Any connection?
I don't know.
Nor I've seen this explained.
Perhaps the mall became a general term,
and the Americans picked it up and applied it indiscriminantly
of its origin.
Absolutely.
Well, the Romans crossed the river, as they did in London,
but found an island about 20 acres large
in the center of the river which became the foundation
of the city of Paris.
The Romans stayed until about the fifth century.
One of the governors of the Romans was--
had my name.
He was a cousin--
he was a nephew of the Emperor Constantine.
He then became the last of the Roman emperors.
He was killed by his own troops because he
was unlike his uncle or a Christian.
He believed in stemming the Christian epidemic
and wanted Rome to remain in touch with the Mithrian rights
and multigods and systems of religion, which was being
sabotaged by Christianity.
I'm just going to go through some
of the aspects of this spatial system is put into place.
Philippe August, 1180 to 1223, built on the Ile de Cité,
the island.
He built a palace, the beginning of the Louvre,
the law courts, the bishop's palace, Ile de Cite,
all on the 20 acres.
He built the second wall.
He already agitated for the rebuilding of Les Halles.
Les Halles, the land of Les Halles
was developed and occupied by Jews.
In the 12th century, it was common to be--
for kings to be anti-Semitic.
The Jews were expelled from their property,
and Les Halles was built. So when you go to Les Halles
today, which are now an underground shopping center,
you'll have to think back to understand that it was land
from which Jews were expelled.
In England, at the same time, Jews
had to wear a badge to show themselves as
different from ordinary people.
They had to pay tax when they entered or left London.
And Henry II, I think it was.
So the behavior of the French King
was in sync, synchronized with the behavior of his colleagues
out in Europe.
Notre Dame was built in the 12th century.
So centered is Paris in the geography of France
that, even today, all measurements in France
measured from Notre Dame.
There isn't that sense of centrality in the London.
There were crowds gathered to watch a hanging,
but nothing like the crowds which
gathered to watch the guillotine and to watch people be headed,
to wath cats being fried.
The great King Henry IV, a 16th century king
whose second wife Marie de' Medici
I've mentioned already in relation to Cours la Reine,
he built a large section of the central part of Paris, bridges,
palaces, churches, gardens.
He built the Pont Neuf.
He also built the Place Royale, which
is the largest residential square in Europe
and the predictor of the Covent Garden model.
The Cours la Reine, at least the Place Royale,
which is now the Place des Vosges,
is 140 meters, if I remember correctly,
140 meters by 140 meters.
It's the largest residential public space in Europe,
built as the residence for the royalty and the aristocracy.
A number of attributes of the street system were reinforced--
oh, let me just--
just want the correct quotation.
"On April the 10th, 1783, the first royal declaration
of an urban policy was promulgated.
It was worth noting that it followed an accurate map."
Turgot, he made the first correct map of Paris.
It was correct in the sense that it was more accurate
than the typical perspective view of cities up to that time.
The Great Map of Rome by Nolli was 1748.
And Turgot did as best he could.
The great first orthographic map of Paris
was the work of a Burgundian architect called Verniquet.
Verniquet took accurate measurements
during the day in the crowded Paris streets.
His grand observations were corrected by triangulation
to determine the elevations of the city.
In 1783, there's an interesting connection
between the availability of an accurate map and the capacity
to make a pronouncement of urban policy.
The streets are important for the public welfare.
They ought to be sufficiently wide and free of any barriers
to the free and easy passage of vehicles and pedestrians.
They further asserted that overly tall buildings
were prejudicial to clean air in a city as populous as Paris
as well as contrary to public safety and prone to fire.
Already, in 1793, there was not only
the ability to demarcate space accurately
because of an accurate map, but the capacity
to put into place regulations which
decided what the dimensions of a street
were and also of the ruling, which has lasted
in central Paris ever since, and that
is not to allow tall buildings.
Whilst the spatial idea of having
as direct a distance between two monumental points
was an idea which had been around
in French landscape for a long time,
there was nobody, really, who could articulate
that idea in practice.
The street system was not only for play.
It was for rapid movement.
Denied by the building of barricades,
the street system was also a sequence
of connectivity between various aspects of the city.
Already, early on, the French King
decided that the university would be on the Left Bank
and commerce would be on the Right Bank.
But instead of developing these as the sole elements
of the space, a system of avenues which connected
the important points, often monuments, reticulated and made
a multidimensional space, in this case, a box
base of limited height but a compressed space, now
of two million people, all articulated by the rulings
about streets.
Haussmann, who became prefect in 1851,
was really responsible for being the first urban manager
in any city in relatively recent times.
What he did was take an idea which
was in the DNA of the French Parisian system of streets
and make it possible.
Paris was an unruly medieval city.
It was-- you read Stendhal, he talks
about the mud in the streets and the filth in the streets.
It was no different from most cities at that time.
And it also was the site of cholera.
There were great cholera epidemics in 1839 and in 1842.
There were workers riots regularly
in 1830s, the 1840s, this following
that Great Revolution of 1789.
Haussmann arrived after the failure
of the last-- second-last king to maintain his position,
and he was replaced by Louis Napoleon.
Louis Napoleon had been in exile.
And there are stories of him being in Durgin-Park,
in the restaurant in Boston, talking
about this great new city that he was going to build
when he went back to Paris.
He had watched Regent Street in London
and, with great admiration for the--
what built Regent Street in London.
The compact included permission by the Parliament,
a million pounds of money from the bank,
and the right to purchase property
in order that the property may be transformed according
to a street system.
Louis Napoleon was obsessed with this idea
that he could rebuild Paris.
He happens to be the last king in the history of Paris.
He made a bad decision to start a war with the Prussians,
and Paris was bombarded and the court moved to Versailles
and a republic was established after the war.
So Haussmann's 20 years are 20 years
at the end of 900 years of royal regime in Paris.
You cannot account for a similar set of circumstances in London
or in Vienna or in Berlin or any of the great European cities.
Haussmann was a maniac for a number of things.
Spatially, I don't know about his personal life here.
That's another story altogether.
He wanted absolute control.
He says to the Emperor--
when they have the first meeting of the town planning commission
and there are lots of speeches and everybody's
sitting around--
he talks to the Emperor after the meeting
and says, "What a waste of time.
All these people like big speeches, and nothing happened.
We don't get any work done."
The Emperor says, "Well, how big does the commission
have to be?"
He says, "Well, the Emperor, you would have to be there
and I have to be there, and I can't think of anybody else."
The Emperor says, "Sounds like a good plan to me."
So the commission becomes one man, the Prefect of the Seine.
Rambuteau, the Prefect of the Seine before him--
there were a number of others, Berger and Persigny and so on--
but Rambuteau tried to extend the East-West access
to the Bastille, as Napoleon tried to do, but failed.
He proposed the street which has his name, the Rue Rambuteau,
but could only afford to build it out
of the budget of the city.
He could build one mile, and he was allowed to make it.
He only asked for 13 meters width.
He was allowed 20 meters.
But the story of Rambuteau is the story of the fact that you
cannot do a major reconstruction of a city out of the capital
budget of the city.
What the greatest invention of Haussmann,
it was not easy arrangement, but economists like Saint-Simon
constructed the idea that if you improved an asset, its worth,
no matter how much you invest in the improvement,
its worth in the end is going to pay it back many times.
It's called deficit spending, today.
And Haussmann understood that in order
to rebuild Paris from being a medieval slum to a modern city,
you needed to develop more capital
than the ordinary taxation system in the city can do.
So he took the money from the octroi system, borrowed money.
He expropriated land.
In 1783-- no.
Slowly, in the 18th century, the control of Paris by the kings
diminished.
And when the rule-- after the Revolution, of course,
there were no kings until Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon.
The notion that you could move people out of their domains,
rebuild the premises in which they lived, and not
care for them through replacement accommodation
and so on, took hold under Haussmann.
Haussmann, in 20 years, rebuilt Paris
in ways which were part of the DNA street system of Paris
and made possible, in modern times, by deficit spending.
The loans which Haussmann accumulated
in the 20 years where only repaid in 1929,
but Paris was an immensely more valuable city in 1929
than it was in 1850.
So we have the introduction into the urban system of a business
model, of a management model.
Haussmann had his own predilections.
He did not believe that individual buildings
were important.
He believed that the systems of building were important.
He hated the idiosyncrasy.
All the buildings had to be the same height.
There's an image in what I gave you.
There's a photograph of a street in Paris
where he forces the property on the left
to shift its turret to the street in order
that it balance a building on the opposite side
of the street.
What else?
This is an enormously long story,
but I'm giving you the bounds of it.
If you're interested, there's good literature
on the history of Paris and certainly
the period of 1850 to 1870.
What else can I say before we look at some images?
This is about as bare a description of Paris
as I can imagine.
But the extraordinary capacity for the street system
to be the major articulator of movement, of war,
of play, of distribution, of psychogeography,
Haussmann felt that if you look down an avenue,
you had to have a closed vista.
You had to be led to something which was an important place.
In Washington, which has a kind of Parisian kind of plan,
the intersections of the diagonal avenues,
where they meet each other, produce nothing.
In Paris, there's always an important square or monument.
When Haussmann decides that we-- that the city needs an opera,
he builds the Rue de Opera and then the opera itself.
The opera, it has an extraordinary interior.
Adding to the complexity of the spatial relationship of access
to the opera--
the facade of the opera is a monument standing freely
in space--
and then the entrance and interior, a fantastic interior,
as well.
What you have in this Haussmannian system
is this state set of multifunctional connectors
tying decentralized aspects of it.
There's no center to Paris.
There are many centers.
You have, as you'll see in some of the slides,
passages connecting with covered roofs
in between the boulevards.
You have an articulate and very elementary system based,
as I say, on of DNA of Paris since the 15th century.
Why the French articulated their space
around the idea of minimizing distance between points
and being articulate about that distance and the experience
of that distance is still, to me, unclear.
But it's absolutely different from the case of London,
where we have one street, Regent Street,
artifacted in a similar pathway.
As Haussmann did it, the scale of a city.
I need to see if there's anything else I should say.
Any questions?
STUDENT: If I understood what you said earlier,
it was that the idea of a street or a path connecting monuments
is like an older idea than Haussmann.
If I understood you correctly, like, where
did that originate from, like in Paris or in French culture?
JULIAN BEINART: Well, I don't know.
As you'll see, in the second slide I
will show you of an image of streets in the 15th century--
oh, it's later.
It's probably 17th century Paris.
You will see diagonal road systems
in these rural areas around Paris
as well as in some in Paris itself.
When I talk about the DNA of a city,
I don't know exactly what I'm saying.
It's a biological explanation, assuming
that there are repetitive elements, significant elements
in a culture, which repeat.
Often, we don't quite know why.
I often think that the French are probably
more direct than anybody else philosophically
and probably decided, like Bismarck did,
that the way to fight a war is to go in a straight line
because you'll find nobody else on the straight line.
Everybody else is fussing around all over the place.
It's the direct avenue to accomplish
the friction of distance.
I can't-- I wish I could answer it.
I'm sure a French, if we had a French scholar here
or a French historian, there may be a--
I've often looked for an answer, but I haven't found it.
It's interesting to raise that question
because, now, two million people are living
in this precious construction, and six million people are
living in bungalows, in public housing, because public housing
was not asserted as an element to be incorporated
into the Haussmannian puzzle.
The city now has this empty sprawl,
which everybody dislikes.
And Sarkozy says, I need to do something about it.
I don't know if you followed this competition.
Did you?
Did you see the results?
STUDENT: I remember seeing some of these renderings,
but I don't know.
I don't know what's going to--
JULIAN BEINART: Oh, it was, I'm--
I don't know if there's a book of the entrants now available,
but it was subject to a lot of publicity at the time.
And the images I've just gathered here
are taken from some of the publicity at the time.
A number of things that one wants to say about this.
Everybody acknowledges that the way to enlarge--
not to enlarge, to fill the space,
empty space around the concentrated city,
is not to expand the city itself.
None of the 10 entries in the competition which
use streets, avenues, diagonalized systems
as an extension of the Haussmannian grid.
There are many attempts to do strong constructions,
strong constructions meaning constructions
which have a strong physical spatial dimension.
For instance, Grumbach proposes that Paris will extend itself
westward along with the Seine to accommodate something
like 16 million people, arguing that every great city
in the world is a port city and Paris
should become a port city.
A linear city of 16 miles--
or 16 million people would take about an hour by public transit
or fast train from Paris to Rouen.
And it's a strong idea.
You can imagine a city like this, following
this pattern and developing interesting relationships
between public transportation along the water
and many aspects of it.
What will stop it from developing
the same condition of sprawl as now exists, I don't know.
He doesn't detail very much about anything other
than the concept itself.
There are some crazy propositions.
The one is to take, just close the Gare du Nord
and shift the Gare do Nord into the Banlieues
and have it as the premier railway station in Europe.
Richard Rogers, the British architect,
has a modest proposal.
He's really interested in the the politics
of all of the groups in the Banlieues
and how they could be brought together.
He extends some of the radial system,
but covers them with green--
remember that the computation was called
for post-Kyoto Resolution.
Post-Kyoto means that the ecological consequences
of the plan were important.
Jean Nouvel, for instance--
many of the competitors proposed to cover all the buildings
with sun collectors, energy collectors from the sun.
Jean Nouvel says, all of the housing,
public housing built in the Banlieues
are just bad buildings.
They just can't keep them and convert them
in as interesting and dramatic and up-to-date
fashion as possible.
He says silly things like, "Paris
must become the great art center of the world again."
He proposes something on the Ile de Cité which I
can't understand.
There's almost a sense of tiredness about the scheme,
as if there isn't really a formula
anymore for making urban space.
Haussmann has really terminated 900 years
of French royal effort to build walls, to build monuments.
Imagine having a monument in the center of a city which
was built by the first king and then torn down and rebuilt
by the second king and then rebuilt and rebuilt
and rebuilt and rebuilt as the Paris--
as a palace, ending up with I.M. Pei doing
a kind of central focal point for it after it
becomes a museum after a thousand years of palace.
It's the largest museum in the world,
I think, and certainly probably the most significant.
Yet it's on the River Seine.
It blocks access to the river.
It's a big block of something or other.
It's as permanent as the city, and there's
no moving it as many have.
And there's, in a class later on,
we look at temporary environments in cities.
I will go through the various French five French exhibitions
in the center of Paris.
1855, four years after the Crystal Palace; 1868; 1879,
I think; 1889; and 1900.
1889, of course, the Eiffel Tower.
Jean Giraudoux, the French playwright,
talks about the center of Paris as being a stone site,
a permanent, fixed, [INAUDIBLE] set of operations,
and these temporary exhibitions are the sort
of way of animating them.
It's like a circus coming to small town once a year.
It's an extraordinary idea, that a city
could be fossilized in some sort of way, gaining
in prestige, becoming the greatest tourist
city of the world.
Why is Paris the greatest tourist city of the world?
What is there about its spatial strategy
that I've tried to spend an hour talking about that
makes it so attractive?
Is it everybody's last opportunity somehow?
It's the last construction of cities
that made sense to people, that you knew where you were,
that it had an enormous degree of relatability,
much like Manhattan.
Manhattan's plan is as naive, perhaps,
as linking a bunch of nodal points with streets.
Any thought about that?
Finn Geipel's plan in the computation
is an MIT kind of plan.
He was, three years, a visiting professor
before the competition.
It's a kind of eco-friendly city with no particular form,
high degrees of--
there's low visibility, but high degrees of communication
through telephones, through all kinds
of modern electronic conveniences.
What am I saying?
Am I arguing that we have lost a formula for doing
things which have impact?
All we do is build taller buildings with funnier shapes.
STUDENT: This doesn't answer your question,
but it's something that I'm needing to go back to.
When Haussmann, and you were talking about that being
in the DNA of Paris, the idea, on things I've always thought
about Haussmann that never seems to get talked about as much is
the relationship of those streets to the medieval streets
and how it's--
I mean that's like the big difference or one
of the differences between how the city works
and how Haussmann's intervention in Cairos works
is Haussmann's streets work in a context of the preexisting
streets, versus just laying those down
and that being your whole strategy for having a city.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
You'll see, on some of the slides, some plans
of the Haussmann roads impacting the existing medieval texture.
It's pretty ruthless.
I mean, you know, there's no--
STUDENT: But the--
JULIAN BEINART: --notion that the people
who live under the system, there's no replacement.
They pay a marginal penalty for acquiring the land,
but there's no--
urban renewal, in this country, produced no great evocative
features either.
My point-- it's rather a nasty point--
is that if you're going to be brutal,
at least produce something worthwhile.
[LAUGHTER]
If you're going to be nasty, do it to some effect.
It's a horrible principle in modern life
where we are inclined to not give power.
I mean, Haussmann construed the rules
so that it was possible for the Prefect
of the Seine, the chief management officer of the city,
to decide which property could be confiscated.
There was no such ruling ever in England, and certainly not
in the United States, under urban renewal.
But I'm trying to make the argument that we
are in a different time.
We have different commodities to work with.
But there's a sense that--
I know.
I mean, the critique of Haussmann's plan by architects
has been fairly general and quite right in many respects.
Richard [INAUDIBLE] argument against the subdivision
of the Arondissement by Haussmann
in the political units and the Banlieues being left alone,
yeah.
I mean, perhaps I'm talking about a lost nostalgia
for a lost unity which we've now dispatched
in favor of a greater sense of well-being about all people.
I don't know if you saw a movie called La Haine, The Hate,
by an American director, I think Arthur Moskovitz.
STUDENT: Mathieu Kassovitz.
JULIAN BEINART: Mathieu Kassovitz.
Do you remember the movie?
STUDENT: Yeah, I'm a fan.
JULIAN BEINART: It's an extraordinary movie.
It follows a group of young men from the Banlieues,
where they are surrounded by sculpture in public place
in this rather dismal new town.
They venture into Paris, into the heart of the Old City,
and start destroying environments.
They go into cocktail parties and drink all the wine.
They become just an intolerable nuisance.
And one of them is killed.
I don't remember how he dies, but--
do you remember?
STUDENT: That's the very end.
He gets shot by a cop, but that's actually back
in the Banlieues.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
For those of you who know Henri Lefebvre's work,
the right to the town is exemplified by that.
If you have two distinct towns, if you grow up
on the wrong side of the railroad,
you are disestablished in your right to the town.
In Paris, which becomes more and more expensive, more and more,
the great tourist center of the world building
more and more museums, artifacts along the quay of the river,
the curious quays of the river, the competition
is not going to work.
The competition for cities is a waste of time.
The variables are too mentally complicated, too.
City planning is not a unique-- a one sort of a time exercise.
The only plan I know of a city that
was any good as a competition, although it was never built,
was the Green City competition in Russia, La Ville Verte.
Which we'll-- when we deal with Russia,
we will spend some time talking, looking at that competition.
But competitions are poor models for working
through some of the issues we've talked about.
No wonder none of these plans ever get to pass.
Sarkozy's not president any longer.
I don't know what's going to happen, if anything.
Let's look at some of these images
because they tell more of the story than my words.
I hope somebody-- none of French history
because I've been very irresponsible in plundering
French history.
Here's the Roman crossing and the Ile de la Cité and some
images of the Bishop's palace.
This is prior to Notre Dame, the law courts
centering in the 20 acres, in the center, almost
all the components of the earlier city.
Next.
Here are the diagrams that interest me.
This is a 1750 plan of Paris and its surroundings.
What are these things?
These are hunting grounds.
These, somebody once said to me that these are,
if you designed a hunting environment,
you would diagonalize the road and have
many points of contact.
This is Patte's--
Louis XIV, having emancipated himself from Paris,
many of these kings, yeah, were alienated from their home city
and left.
Peter, the great tsar of Russia did as well.
Here, you can see a plan which has as its principle
a set of points, diagonals spreading,
connecting to other points.
The beginnings of a plan which suggest my argument of a DNA.
Le Corbusier's Voisin plan for Paris
has none of that spirit at all.
It's a ruthless repositioning of modernism
as against the canonical street system.
Next.
Well, these are just fairly obvious.
It's interesting to contrast the plan of London.
It's about the same scale as the plan of Paris.
Paris circumvented by walls, one stretching further out
than the other.
London and being a free set of connected, loosely connected,
villages, all encompassed much more spread-out system
without the strong definitions given
by these are the walls or the streets
or the monuments in that city.
This is not a monumental city at all.
It's a sprawling, elegant microtuned environment.
Next.
Here are two images of streets in Florence being employed
for games and Marie de' Medici's influence on the Cours la
Reine.
Next.
The Cours la Reine on the left, a place for the wealthy to have
sex in a broad sense of the word.
[LAUGHTER]
Next.
The great adventure of perspective.
The capacity for the middle class.
This is Caillebotte's great painting.
It's in, I think, in the Art Institute in Chicago.
The use of this street with umbrellas.
Next.
The Place Royale, the great aristocratic center.
The Place the Vosges on the right, today.
Next.
The Rue Rambuteau.
Rambuteau's attempt to build a street
without deficit financing help.
Next.
Haussmann and the dark black being
the elements that he inserted into the revised system.
Next.
Here, you get the details of a--
this the Boulevard Sebastopol.
That space is taken up at will.
This connector, it doesn't matter that there
are houses underneath here.
The houses are just separated away from the others
in order to make a new imposition.
This is about as ruthless as--
and it's probably the last time in history
that this is being able to be done in a democratic society.
Next.
Napoleon didn't pay much attention to Paris.
He wanted to make Paris into a royal city.
And the East-West access through the Champs-Élysées became his
primary focus, the Arc de Triomphe being the connector--
not the connector-- being his great monument.
He also attempted to stretch the Champs-Élysées eastward
to the Bastille.
It's an extraordinary Haussmannian device.
This is the Avenue Fourche, which
has the wealthiest real estate in Europe on the sides.
This street is about 450 feet wide.
That's about twice as wide as Commonwealth Avenue.
And the Bois-- leading to the Bois de Boulogne,
another one of Haussmann's creations.
Here's the river.
Here's the intersection of the Champs-Élysées into the Bois du
Boulogne and the Avenue Fourche.
Next.
The Académie Nationale de Musique and the access to it,
the monument at the end of the wide road, Avenue de l'Opera.
Next.
The interior of the opera by Garnier, an extraordinary--
Walter Benjamin writes about Paris and talks
about the invention of the interior, the first time
that the interior seen as significant.
And this study is done by the students of Foucault, showing
the subdivision of the French house
over time, introducing what Benjamin calls
the adventure of the interior.
Next.
Here is the ultimate.
There's the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir,
the ultimate expression of destination and movement
and the interior connections.
Next.
The underground services in the mid '90s,
the cross-section of a Paris street.
And during one of the exhibitions in Paris,
a trip through the sewage system was a great pleasure.
Next.
The Banlieues, here is the taking down of the dues,
tax houses on the--
where the octroi was collected and the conditions
in the Banelieues.
Next.
In the street is war.
1848, the barricaded streets in the center of--
on the east of--
on the east of Paris, here are the barricade lines.
The use of this street is war.
Next.
1872, and the two-month-long occupation
of the Western of the Eastern part of Paris,
again, with the use of barricades.
Barricades slow down troops, and people
in the adjacent buildings can fire down on the troops
when they slow down.
Next.
1968, and again the use of this street in protest.
Next.
OK.