Joseph Fouché recently alluded to Georges-Eugène Haussmann‘s rebuilding of Paris for Napoleon III:
High rise housing surrounded by open space and broad avenues sounds terrible if you assume they were designed to cultivate the optimal human existence for its patrons. They sound great, however, if you want easily contained human corrals surrounded by wide open fields of fire that are perfect for timely whiffs of grapeshot.
I think the high-rise housing has to get a lot higher, and the open space has to get a lot more open, before we get modern banlieues.
Anyway, Fouché continues on his own blog, The Committee of Public Safety:
Haussmann’s city planning was based on the principle that the safety of a city street depends on the number of unencumbered shots that government forces can get off against the eyes that are watching them. Haussmann built broad streets and parks because it made it easier to mass and deploy men, horses, and cavalry against the revolutionary mobs that kept Paris in revolutionary tumult from 1789 through the middle of the nineteenth century while denying those mobs the narrow streets that were easy to clog up with defensive barricades. If Jacobs’ triumph was found in keeping New York planning dictator Robert Moses from running a highway through Greenwich Village, Haussmann’s triumph was found in the ease with which Adophe Thiers crushed the Paris Commune in 1871.
Here’s where he starts to lose me:
Both of these principles are subsets of the greater principle that morality is the annihilation of public space. In political economy, this means recognizing that the expansion of what’s considered a private matter means a contraction in public space. In theology, it means recognizing that truly private space is impossible under the unblinking Omniscience of the Divine.
(By the way, the French pronounce Haussmann’s clearly German name more like Ossmann.)