Walter Benjamin and Urban Planning (Week 2 extra)

• Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher.
• He was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School.
• His work focused on political theory and aesthetics.
• Benjamin's unfinished study of Paris's shops or arcades combines these interests.
• Benjamin explores how history crystallizes in particular urban elements.
• The sections focus on two issues:
  • A critique of the scientization of urban planning.
  • How boundaries for cities are created.
• Benjamin's analysis of city boundaries has influenced many contemporary urban theorists and planners.
• He was critical of the massive reconstruction of Paris in the ninteenth century under Baron Haussmann.
• Haussmann ordered that most of the city be dug up to build broad, new boulevards.
• Some, like Benjamin, were critical of Haussmann's dehumanized, overly scientific approach.
• Social scientists replaced philosophers as the urban thinkers par excellence in the twentieth century, but some philosophers have resisted.

The Arcades Project (1935–1939)

• Haussmann's activity is incorporated into Napoleonic imperialism, which favors investment capital.
• Speculation is at its height in Paris.
• Haussmann's expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on fraud.
• The rulings of the Court of Cassation, inspired by the bourgeois and Orleanist opposition, increase financial risks of Haussmannization.
• Haussmann tried to shore up his dictatorship by placing Paris under an emergency regime.
• In 1864, he vented his hatred of the rootless urban population before the National Assembly.
• Rising rents drive the proletariat into the suburbs, causing the quartiers of Paris to lose their distinctive physiognomy.
• The "red belt" forms due to these rising rents.
• Haussmann gave himself the title of "demolition artist" and emphasized his vocation in his memoirs.
• The central marketplace is Haussmann's most successful construction.
• In the wake of Haussmann only one church, one public building, and one barracks remained in the Ile de la Cité.
• Parisians saw Haussmann's transformations as a monument of Napoleonic despotism.
• The inhabitants of the city no longer felt at home and became conscious of the inhuman character of the metropolis.
• The etchings of Meryon (around 1850) constitute the death mask of old Paris.
• The true goal of Haussmann's projects was to secure the city against civil war through making the erection of barricades impossible.
• Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving with the same purpose.
• Engels studied the tactics of barricade fighting.
• Haussmann widened streets to make barricades impossible.
• New streets connected the barracks in straight lines with the workers' districts.
• Contemporaries termed the operation "strategic embellishment".
• Haussmann's ideal in city planning consisted of long straight streets opening onto broad perspectives.
• This ideal corresponds to the tendency to ennoble technological necessities through spurious artistic ends.
• The temples of the bourgeoisie's spiritual and secular power were to find their apotheosis within the framework of these long streets.
• The perspectives were screened with canvas draperies and unveiled like monuments.
• The view would disclose a church, a train station, an equestrian statue, or some other symbol of civilization.
• With the Haussmannization of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone.
• Though intended to endure in quasi-perpetuity, it reveals its brittleness.
• The Avenue de l'Opéra affords a perspective on the porter's lodge at the Louvre and shows unrestrained megalomania.
• The arcades are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises.
• The arcade is a city, a world in miniature.
• During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared.
• The city is only apparently homogeneous.
• The phenomenon of the boundary can be experienced in a more originary way in cities.
• To know cities means to understand those lines that function as limits.
• As a threshold, the boundary stretches across streets.
• Haussmann's predilection for perspectives represents an attempt to dictate arts forms to technology, which always results in kitsch.