Haussmann’s Paris became a source of inspiration, influencing developments in many
Planning Europe’s capital cities 90 other cities. For most of our own century, right up to the end of the 1960s, the big-city environments of the nineteenth century have usually been judged harshly. They have been condemned by generations of writers representing different schools of urban development. But looking at Paris herself, several of the city’s otherwise most rabid
critics have found it difficult to quell a certain, albeit perhaps unwilling, admiration. For
instance, writing in Town Planning Review in 1913, Patrick Abercrombie said
‘Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris is the most brilliant piece of Town Planning in the
world.