Improvements in Urban Planning
In addition to public health improvements, more effective urban planning was a major key to a better quality of urban life in the nineteenth century. France took the lead in this area during the rule of Napoleon III (r. 1848–1870), who sought to promote the welfare of his subjects through government action. He believed that rebuilding much of Paris would provide employment, improve living conditions, limit the outbreak of cholera epidemics — and testify to the power and glory of his empire. In Baron Georges Haussmann (HOWS-muhn) (1809–1884), Napoleon III found an authoritarian planner capable of bulldozing both buildings and opposition. (Map 22.2).
MAP 22.2
The Modernization of Paris, ca. 1850–1870The addition of broad boulevards, large parks, and grand train stations transformed Paris. The cutting of the new north-south axis — known as the Boulevard Saint-Michel — was one of Haussmann’s most controversial projects. It razed much of Paris’s medieval core and filled the Île de la Cité with massive government buildings.
The Paris of 1850 was a labyrinth of narrow, dark streets, the results of desperate overcrowding and a lack of effective planning. Residents faced terrible conditions and extremely high death rates. The entire metropolis had few open spaces and only two public parks.
For two decades Haussmann and his fellow planners proceeded on many interrelated fronts. They razed old buildings in order to cut broad, straight, tree-lined boulevards through the center of the city as well as in new quarters rising on the outskirts. These boulevards, designed in part to prevent the easy construction and defense of barricades by revolutionary crowds, permitted traffic to flow freely and afforded impressive vistas. Their creation also demolished some of the worst slums. New streets stimulated the construction of better housing, especially for the middle classes. Planners created small neighborhood parks and open spaces throughout the city and developed two very large parks suitable for all kinds of holiday activities. The city improved its sewers, and a system of aqueducts more than doubled the city’s supply of clean, fresh water.
Rebuilding Paris provided a new model for urban planning and stimulated urban reform throughout Europe, particularly after 1870. In city after city, public authorities mounted a coordinated attack on many of the interrelated problems of the urban environment. As in Paris, improvements in public health through better water supply and waste disposal often went hand in hand with new boulevard construction. Zoning expropriation laws, which allowed a majority of the owners of land in a given quarter of the city to impose major street or sanitation improvements on a reluctant minority, were an important mechanism of this new urban reform movement.