ABSTRACT
An American study, of perfectly serious intent, has used a sophisticated points system to compare some of the world’s greatest cities, and to discover which one is regarded as the most attractive. It is no great surprise to find that Paris1 received the greatest number of points.2 Generations of Europeans and Americans have assumed without question that Paris is the most beautiful and exciting city in the world. This idea of Paris as a town in a class by itself is not in fact very old; it goes back to the second Empire, and perhaps more exactly to 1867. This was when Napoleon III’s collapsing regime gathered itself together for one last glorious fling, namely the second French Exposition universelle. The year of the exhibition established Paris’s reputation as the city of luxury and sin, but also as the city of magnificent scenic effects. Only a few decades earlier, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris had been regarded as one of the dirtiest places in Europe. The explanation of this astonishing change lay in the radical transformation effected under Georges-Eugène Haussmann. If other nineteenth-century planning efforts have attracted little attention-at any rate until quite recently-'Haussmann’s Paris’ has become a recognized concept. No other planner in any other country or from any other period has achieved such fame, not only in professional circles but in the world at large. Paris is therefore the obvious point of departure for a survey of nineteenth-century capital city planning.
