Books

Throughout history, architects, politicians, and planners have framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper—merely as problems to be solved. Describing a site as a bidonville—the Francophone equivalent of shantytown—positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural ...

In Atlantic Unbound, Peter Minosh examines neoclassical architecture within the Atlantic World—a site of colonialism, resource extraction, commodity circulation, capital, and slavery spanning Europe, North America, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book centers on France during the expansion of its colonial empire and the ...

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct ...

Ambivalent Alliance convincingly defends several provocative insights into a key period in the history of French Catholicism. It investigates the strange marriage of convenience, from 1899 to 1939, between the French church and the ultra-rightist, chauvinist, monarchist, and anti-Semitic organization called the Acton Française, and raises many disturbing questions. Why did ...

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied ...