Design Change in Paris

Cities change all the time, growing larger, replacing old buildings, redesigning roadways and connections between buildings and regions, and similar changes as the population shifts, uses change, political leadership is replaced, and other forces are brought to bear. Numerous changes were made in the overall design of the city of Paris after the nineteenth century, absorbing and in some ways altering the original plan for the city and many of the shifts that had taken place since that time.

Paris was a medieval city that grew around the river Seine, and this capital city of France remained much as it had been in the medieval period into the nineteenth century. The Revolution in 1789 had changed this city very little except for the razing of the Bastille. The city at that time was considered an anachronism by the time of Louis XVI, for it consisted of dense, dark, intricate streets that were not suited to the needs of the growing metropolis Paris had become. There had been many legal obstacles to

change and development in place, and the Revolution did bring an end to these so that changes could now be made. Property belonging to ?migr?s and to the Church changed hands and could not be developed, and this amounted to one-eight of the space in the city. The main body of the densely built city remained intact, however. Napoleon I intended to bring about major structural changes but managed to put few into effect, and in the 1850s, Paris was still being described as a ci

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ctures and certain programs then in place. The commune destroyed 238 buildings, including the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, and the Hotel de Ville. Once these buildings were replaced, the next step was to complete street improvements. Paris rushed to complete this task in time for the Exhibition of 1878 (Olsen 54-55). Haussmann left Paris with a new network of streets forming the central part of his program of urban renovation. He tried to augment and extend the existing series of boulevards and to incorporate all into a city-wide system of circulation. He used a series of diagonal streets to connect the interior and exterior boulevards. A major element was the creation of a major north-south, east-west axial crossing in the center of the city, the so-called grande crois?e (Evenson 15-17). The boulevard would become the symbol of modern Paris: City life was essentially a public life, and the street was the stage on which the urban drama was played. All the variety and vitality of Paris--its social range, its material abundance, its sense of fashion--seemed to be visible in the streets (Evenson 21). Haussmann had worked within the existing city, accepting its monumental scale and its high density, but the idea of urban si

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