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Urbanisme du Paris souterrain : premiers projets de chemin de fer urbain et naissance de l'urbanisme des cités modernes

1998; CDU SEDES; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3406/hes.1998.2011

1777-5906

Nicholas Papayanis,

French Urban and Social Studies

Abstract This is a study of pioneering plans for the creation of an underground rail system for Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century and their link to both a new, organic conception of the city and the birth of modern urban planning. Part of a larger debate in the 1840s on the shape of Paris, the projects discussed here formed part of a discourse that envisaged the modern city as a dynamic field of continuous movement and space-time compression as the key to its efficient functioning. Focusing on the underground plans of Hector Horeau, FI. de Kérizouet, Edouard Brame and Eugène Flachat, and Louis Le Hir, this analysis not only demonstrates the connection between these early projects and a vision of Paris as a circulatory system for the efficient circulation of commerce and pedestrian flow. It also explores the belief of city planners that mass urban transport could alleviate social tensions caused by overcrowding in the city center by affording workers relatively cheap and efficient mobility in and out of the city. Reflected within these projects were also the interests and concerns of a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. Following Henri Lefebvre's insight that space in a capitalist society is not neutral but reflects the requirements of capitalism, this study examines the interest taken by capitalist entrepreneurs in the planning of Parisian urban transit. Equally significant, these projects, by starting to consider the city globally with respect to circulation and by plotting straight lines above and below ground in the mapping of an ideal urban railway system, constitute important intellectual underpinnings for the creative destruction and rebuilding of Paris by Georges Haussmann and Napoleon III. Growing out of the eighteenth-century tradition which had already begun to see Paris as a space that could be shaped and transformed according to rational plans and visions, the mid-nineteenth-century speculations on the underground are among the forerunners of modern urban planning concepts and texts.