The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958
Although [Rosemary Wakeman] is not the first, nor will she be the last, to emphasise the humanistic nature of postwar hopes, her discussion of the urban landscape certainly does provide an example of victorious humanism, though it was short lived. Wakeman's exploration of the Left Bank intellec...
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| Published in: | Urban History Review 2011, Vol.39 (2), p.64-65 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Review |
| Language: | eng ; fre |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Although [Rosemary Wakeman] is not the first, nor will she be the last, to emphasise the humanistic nature of postwar hopes, her discussion of the urban landscape certainly does provide an example of victorious humanism, though it was short lived. Wakeman's exploration of the Left Bank intellectual scene and its re-imagining of the city nicely illustrates this success. As opposed to the high modernist vision of city planning, one which saw the city as a site waiting to be cleared of all that was irrational, unhygienic, or sentimentally historic, the new elite of urban planners shared a vision of a decentred metropolis. Wakeman points to urbanists like Marcel Poete, Gaston Bardet, and Pierre Lavedan, among others, who constructed a new spatial topography of Paris based around the collective, everyday experiences of community- whether it was found in a courtyard, the quartier, or the îlot. In short, these urbanists focused on le peuple of Paris and emphasised the populist, collective, humanistic experience of the city. These heroic spaces, where working class people exhibited a true 'Frenchness' and moral correctness, even in the face of often crushing poverty and insalubrious conditions, were also found in cinematic representations of the city. Although Wakeman does not deny that there were some who portrayed these images as revolting, the poetic humanism of the time turned these landscapes into tragic, yet heroic, scenes of modern life. |
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| ISSN: | 0703-0428 1918-5138 |