The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping and Constructing Paris, 1791--1889

摘要

This dissertation concerns the relations between cartography and urban planning in Paris among architects, engineers, and administrators over the course of the long-nineteenth century. It delineates a history of the drawing of Paris, and the representational modes of abstraction that were deployed for knowing and building a city that would come to exemplify modern urban space. Addressing this subject entailed fusing architectural histories with histories of science and technology, as well as scholarship in image and media theory in order to relate cartographic rhetorical strategies to social forms of governance. The central question concerns how the material conditions of cartographic representation mediate and generate knowledge, building and construction on the urban scale.;The study begins with the plan of Paris surveyed and drawn by Edme Verniquet and then used to draw projections by the Commission des Artistes during the revolutionary years, includes the plans by Theodore Jacoubet under the Prefect de la Seine Chabrol de Volvic, the plans of the Commission Simeon ordered by Napoleon III and the new plans by Eugene Deschamps directed by the Prefect de la Seine Georges-Eugene Haussmann after the annexation of the surrounding suburbs of Paris, and concludes with the Atlas des Anciens Plans and the Atlas des Travaux Publics directed by Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand during the early years of the Third Republic. By examining the geometrical and quantitative methods employed by surveyors and engineers to construct urban plans, the subsequent techniques architects and administrators used to draw on them, the administrative values that made those drawn lines operational, and the means by which those values were presented cartographically to the public at the 1889 Universal Exposition, this thesis asserts that the building of the French capital city was generated by its flattening into a cartographic site.