What would be the best City desing for today?

No the French can't rule over themselves so they imported Spaniards and Italians in past years. Arabs will be in charge soon

This is complete nonsense.

Haussmann built a few boulevards, like the boulevard Haussmann, avenue Foch and other streets at Etoile... On the West banks it's pretty much only boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Rennes.

Pic related, Paris before Haussmann. As you can tell it's almost the same as today.

London is actually a fascinating place if you put assburger aesthetics aside where everything has to look the same. This contrast where you may see a medieval church next to an Georgian public building, next to a 60s Brutalist office, next to a modern building is just amazing. Keep in mind, I used to hate London and consider it a toilet but I think that my perception of cities evolved in the meanwhile.

Haussmann didn't have just aesthetics in mind when he made Paris that way, the small winding streets of Paris where replaced with avenues that were wide enough for armies to march down and too wide for effective barricades to be built. He was also kinda corrupt in that he tipped off all of his mates to buy the prime bits of land to build the famous mega-stores of Paris (Galeries Lafayette etc). Haussman's Paris is undeniably pretty but its design was influenced by the politics of the time just as much as it was by aesthetics and for it to be built, a lot of medieval buildings and neighbourhoods that we would love to explore nowadays had to be torn down.

The "destruction" caused by Haussmann is vastly overrated, see In the older parts of Paris, 17th and 18th century buildings are far more common than 19th century ones, and there are countless older ones, not to mention medieval churches and the occasional medieval townhouse. There isn't that much brutalism aside from the Soviet embassy, but frankly we can do without that shit.

A beautiful city shouldn't be boringly uniform, and Paris certainly isn't, but it also shouldn't be a nonsensical headache inducing mishmash of whatever.

Honestly I'm more sad about the destruction of several medieval monuments under the Revolution and Napoleon, like the Temple, the Bastille, or the Châtelet. The Temple for example was an entire medieval citadel, the former headquarters of the Knights Templar. It would have been really cool to have something like that in Paris, and it was reasonably out of the way so it didn't really bother anyone.

But I guess back then people didn't put any aesthetic or archaeological value on plain medieval fortresses yet.

I agree with you on Haussmann, I just wanted to raise some points because people tend to idolise him a little too much. Paris certainly isn't boring although, for me, the Haussmann bits are a little repetitive despite being beautiful. London is by no means beautiful or pretty, but it is incredibly interesting and not at all boring.

P.S. France did Brutalism very well, probably better than any other country actually.

Well, the whole idea of architectural conservation of the immediate past is incredibly recent. The only old architecture people used to value up until the 19th-20th century were ancient ruins and that's only because the classical world never lost its status in the eyes of Europe.

Why was the Temple torn down?

>French can't rule themselves
>The guys who exported their Dynasties all over Europe
I want to remind you that both the Spanish and Swedish royal houses are of French descent.

evolo.us/competition/continuous-vertical-city/

Stupidest reason ever.

When the royal family was arrested during the Revolution, they were kept prisoner at the Temple. Later Napoleon tore it down because he didn't want it to become a place of pilgrimage for royalists.

Didn't the revolutionaries during the Paris Commune want to tear down the Notre Dame as well?

Funnily enough, that's exactly the same idea behind how Hitler's bunker was demolished and replaced by a car-park.

When the Versailles troops entered Paris for a week of street battles to take back the city block by block from the Communards, the Communards decided that they would rather destroy the city than lose it. So yes they tried to destroy just about everything. They only managed to destroy the City Hall and the Tuileries Palace though, along with a bunch of historical archives and such. They went as far as setting Notre Dame on fire, but it was put out by interns from the nearby Hôtel-Dieu hospital.

>Destroying people's history permanently because their government won against you temporarily
Suppose they must have done some quite good things to not be seen as massive assholes today.

BTW a more serious threat to Notre Dame was during the Revolution when Saint-Simon, who was a promoter among many other things, offered to buy it up to demolish it and use the stones to build social housing.

That's at least a better reason than just being butthurt.

Literally ISIS tier.

They're mostly seen as massive assholes by non-leftists I think. And something like 30 000 of them were summarily executed during and after the retaking of Paris.

Another funny example, after the fall of Napoleon III, the painter Gustave Courbet petitioned the government to have the Vendôme column demolished. The Commune then went ahead and did it, because the column was a "symbol of barbary and militarism, a permanent insult from the victors to the vanquished" etc. After the Commune fell, the column was restored. But the Communards themselves were dead, so the new president made Gustave Courbet pay the 350 000 francs cost of rebuilding it.

The column btw.

Care to tell how he reacted to that?

Well, but it's a bunker, it's not there's much sightseeing
What happened to the Chancellery, though?

Dint know why you expected any different from extreme leftists

...

...

Crier is like the exact inverse of Le Corbusier.
Excellent at urban planning, bad at architecture.

...

Chicago has a bunch of multilevel streets downtown

And these aren't highways or things like that, but streets.

They've always seemed a very ferris buller (sp?) thing to me that not a lot of other cities seem to have

The dream of separating pedestrian and car traffic is a recurring idea, and maybe a bit utopian. The multilevel street hasnt done this in Chicago at least.

Brasilia's car heavy design also comes to mind as a failed attempt at a rounder wheel.

Build upwards instead of outwards, sprawl fucking sucks

There is something aesthetic about Corbusier's buildings even though they remind me of le 60s tower blocks. I feel as though architecture was heading in the right direction then something terrible happened.