Haussmann's Renovation of Paris

Haussmann's Renovation of Paris, or the Haussmann Plan, was a modernization program of Paris commissioned by Napoléon III and led by the Seine prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870. Though work continued until the end of the 19th century, well after the Second Empire's demise in 1870, it is often referred to as the "Second Empire reforms".

The project encompassed all aspects of urban planning, both in the centre of Paris and in the surrounding districts: streets and boulevards, regulations imposed on facades of buildings, public parks, sewers and water works, city facilities, and public monuments. The planning was influenced by many factors, not the least of which was the city's history of street revolutions.

Haussmann's approach to urban planning was strongly criticised by some of his contemporaries, ignored for a good part of the twentieth century, but later re-evaluated when modernist approaches to urban planning became discredited. His restructuring of Paris gave the city its present form; its long, straight, wide boulevards with their cafés and shops determined a new type of urban scenario and have had a profound influence on the everyday lives of Parisians. Haussmann's boulevards established the foundation of what is today the popular representation of the French capital around the world, cutting through the old Paris of dense and irregular medieval alleyways into a more rationally-designed city with wide avenues and open spaces which extended outwards far beyond the old city limits.