Oct 31, 2022
Paris — the Revolutionary City
The green revolution in Paris is rooted in a history of triumphant innovation.
Years ago, it was said that no one visits Paris for the first time. Paris is so famous throughout the world, its monuments, its museums, its cafes, and scenes along the Seine so well known, that even a first-time visitor feels some familiarity with the city. Yet, Paris has long been recognized as a place of innovation and change. Visitors to Paris today cannot help but be struck by the changes that are taking place.
Paris is a city in the midst of a revolution. Its streets are noticeably greener. There are more bicycles and fewer cars. Parks and cafes replace the expressways that used to line the banks of the Seine. Older residents grumble that it is now nearly impossible to drive anywhere. However, to all appearances Paris is now more welcoming to people going about their daily lives.
The greening of Paris began in earnest after 2015, the year in which Paris grabbed the world’s attention as the site of negotiations that produced the first international agreement to combat climate change, the COP21 agreement. As home to over half the human population, cities have a key role to play in protecting the global environment. And, Paris intends to lead in this effort.
Municipal leaders have adopted ambitious goals to transform transportation, green infrastructure, and improve the quality of air and water in the city. They want to make Paris 100 percent cyclable by 2026 and eliminate diesel- and gasoline-powered cars entirely by 2030. Twenty percent of buildings will have green roofs by 2030. New parks are being created and trees are being planted everywhere. A vase underground water treatment reservoir will make the Seine swimmable for the 2024 Olympic Games.
Paris has launched a revolution in urban redesign. Paris is aiming to be, not just a greener city, but the world’s preeminent sustainable city — the model that other cities will follow. It will accomplish its goal through a combination of ambitious politics, innovative technology, and an engaged populace.
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Paris has done this before. In 1900, with the opening of the international Exposition Universelle, Paris declared itself the “Capital of the Civilized World.” It was the height of the industrial revolution, the Age of Progress, a time of unbridled optimism. The city of Paris embodied all the hope and promise of the new century.
But, Paris at the beginning of the 20th century was a product of a century of profound political, economic, and social upheaval. Change, innovation, experimentation, and the attendant disruption are ingrained in the city’s DNA. The century that produced the modern metropolis of Paris in 1900 began, appropriately enough, with a revolution centered in Paris, the French Revolution of 1789.
Paris had long held the ambition to be the preeminent city of Europe with prestige comparable to the cities of Athens and Rome in ancient times. Louis XIV moved the royal court out of Paris to the village of Versailles in 1682 out of fear for the city’s growing power. The leaders of the French Revolution returned the seat of government of France to Paris. Then, as the aristocracy in Europe and England looked on in horror, they brought the French monarchy to an end with a swift slice from the guillotine.
Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Louis Napoleon, endowed Paris with the trappings of monumental architecture appropriate to it imperial pretensions. During the First French Empire (1804 to 1814), emperor Napoleon Bonaparte made Paris the seat of his European empire of conquest. During the Second French Empire (1852 to 1870), emperor Louis Napoleon launched a decades-long urban renewal project in Paris. This project, directed by Baron von Haussmann, gave the streets of Paris the distinctive character they retain today.
The 19th century industrial revolution made Paris into a center of industry and finance and a showcase of modern technology. Known as the City of Light, Paris was among the first cities to be illuminated by gaslights, early in the century, and electricity at the century’s end. Paris became the center of a global network for communication and transportation made possible with the invention of the railroad, steamships, the telegraph, and the telephone.
Paris staked its claim to preeminence as an industrial power and center for innovation by hosting a series of international expositions in 1867, 1878, 1881, 1889, and 1900. The Eiffel Tower was built to be the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle. By far the tallest structure ever when it was built — a title it held for 40 years — the tower continues to astound visitors today.
The combined impact of the French Revolution and the industrial revolution upended the social order in France. The monarchy was removed, restored, then finally brought to a permanent end. The aristocracy and clergy lost their privileged positions. The feudal economy based on hereditary control of rural estates worked by peasant farmers gave way to an increasingly urbanized economic system based on industry and commerce. Paris, already the largest city in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, grew from a population of 550,000 to 2.7 million by the end of the century.
Two classes rose to prominence in this vast social experiment: the bourgeoisie and the working class. Members of the bourgeoisie, particularly industrialists and financiers, exploited the opportunities brought by industrialization to amass personal fortunes that rivaled the wealth formerly held by aristocratic families. Many of the working class were displaced rural peasants thrown into the city by desperate circumstances. Paris became an arena where these two classes struggled for survival and control over their fates.
The turbulent 19th century produced a third distinctive class of individuals, far less numerous than the bourgeoisie and the working classes but more influential in their own way — the professional engineer. French engineers were highly educated in math and science, and they worked in government and industry as entrepreneurs and technocrats. By their training engineers were imbued with a shared purpose to serve the common good.
The work of French engineers during the 19th century transformed first Paris, and then the world. In Paris, these engineers created the modern metropolis. The transformation of Paris was a revolution in urban design. The city was recreated as a technological marvel, a machine for living. The Eiffel Tower, today universally recognized as the symbol of Paris, was a declaration of technological prowess. It is a spear thrust to the sky by the triumphant engineers of the 19th century.
At the beginning of the century, Paris existed as a conglomeration of medieval hamlets fitted out to serve as a stage for monuments to imperial power and a venue for hedonistic diversions. By the century’s end, Paris was a coherent entity/system knit together by networks of advanced technology for transportation, communication, the supply of food, water, and energy and waste removal and processing.
The story of the transformation of Paris as the first modern metropolis can be read from the fabric of the city itself, in its roads, canals, rail lines, buildings, and subterranean spaces that record over 2000 years of human civilization. This is the foundation on which Paris now is creating the model sustainable city of the 21st century.
