Book Review: How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City

Financier. Nouveau riche. Millionaire. Femme fatale. Fashion. Sidewalk. If any of these terms resonate with you, Joan DeJean posits that you have one place and era to thank: seventeenth century Paris. In DeJean’s telling, the genesis of the modern, Western, planned city can be traced directly to the innovations and experiments in civic infrastructure, spatial development, and public finance dreamed up by France’s pre-Revolution monarchs and vanguards of urban thought. In How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, DeJean paints an illuminating picture of how the City of Light became the birthplace of the inchoate field of urban planning while simultaneously— albeit unconsciously—illustrating how planning’s myriad of intractable problems have been with the profession since its very inception