Paris Remade: Architecture, Planning, and the Post-Industrial Imaginary

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Manuscript in progress

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In 1971, the last of the old market pavilions at Les Halles fell to the wrecking ball.  Amid the rubble, Parisians began to confront the loss of the once great working class city.  Over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, many more familiar sites would disappear, as the city reorganized from an industrial to a predominantly tourist and service economy.

 

Far from a sudden event, however, the deindustrialization of the capital had constituted a core policy of the French State for much of the twentieth century. By the post-World War II period, taming the "monster of Paris" had become planning orthodoxy, as government officials structured the laws and resources of redevelopment to stanch population and industrial growth in the capital.  The plan worked almost too well; by the 1960s, Parisians began to fret that the city the had come to know and love was rapidly changing before their very eyes.  

 

Paris Remade considers how architects, planners, and urban designers responded to these transformations, using the built environment to recast Paris through the construction of a post-industrial imaginary.