With The Other Paris, Luc Sante writes a history of the shadow side of the City of Light—and regrets the success of urban planners, moralizers and busy bodies in driving the shadows away.
His critique is nuanced, acknowledging the achievements of Baron Haussmann, the 19th-century prefect who carved Paris’ broad avenues from a medieval tangle of alleys and brought running water to the masses. Sante saves the bitterest scorn for more recent “visionaries” who tore up viable if impoverished neighborhoods, replacing them with high-rise ghettos along with “the aggressively repellent Pompidou Center” and “the chilling Mitterand Library, which looks like a housing project on the moon.” Sante, who has earned a Grammy as well as a Guggenheim, denounces with mordant elegance the shortsightedness afflicting not only Paris but every city on Earth. “The past, whatever its drawbacks, was wild,” he writes.
Although often unjust and cruel, “there was room for the full range of classes, and everyone was somehow equally involved in the common task of constituting a city.”
