Social Science Research Council

"Engineering Nature: Public Greenspaces in Nineteenth-century Paris"

My dissertation examines the social, cultural, political and environmental aspects of public greenspaces within Paris during the nineteenth century. This project will consider the relationship between the city, its residents and the public parks, demonstrating connections and contradictions. It will broaden the study of mid-century urban development and infuse it with considerations of the cultural impact and aesthetic sensibility of “natural” spaces, as well as a sense of how constructed nature in the urban milieu affected the understanding and daily use of city space. Moreover, this study of the creation and use of Parisian greenspaces under Napoleon III, Haussmann and the designer-engineer Adolphe Alphand, will contribute to a more nuanced, although non-apologetic, history of the Second Empire, pointing out continuities with preceding and subsequent regimes.

The implications of the alterations to the Parisian cityscape reach far beyond the particular world of the Second Empire capital. Our understanding of the place of greenspaces in the metropolitan environment is pertinent both historically and at present, when, for the first time in history, more people on earth live in cities than in rural areas, and as megalopolises such as Istanbul and Shanghai today confront some of the same issues concerning greenspace and the urban environment that Paris faced more than a century ago. My study will move from a broad theoretical and geographical perspective of nineteenth-century public park development to a consideration of the actual practice of Parisian greenspaces, their uses by the urban population and visitors and the potential appeal of that model beyond continental France. While the dissertation will focus on Paris, the work will address thematic concerns such as concepts of the urban environment, nature, hygiene, class and capitalism, public and private spaces, gender and urban identities and the exercise of human agency in the development and use of public greenspaces.