Boulevard Haussmann

Zola was three years old when he moved from Paris to a small town on the south coast. Fifteen years later, he was back there like a hick. In 1858, when Zola returned to his hometown, Paris was clean. Over the last ten years, this underdeveloped city was busy in getting rid of the image of backwardness. Its reputation was notoriously bad for business: infrastructure left behind, many slums, poor street lighting, workers often protest.

Then Louis Napoleon was elected as president and staged a coup. He crowned himself as emperor. Parliament removed. Radical press was subdued. Dissidents fled into exile. Then the emperor did exactly what was done by Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore one hundred years later: modernize the capital, no matter how much the price to be paid.

Through the cold hands of Baron Haussmann, a city administrator, major roads widened to hundreds of meters. Canals were built. Giant pipes installed. Two large station built. Slum settlements razed, replaced with overlapping settlements. "Now Paris, "Zola wrote, "Feeding hundreds of thousands of passer and masons, crossed with pathways strategic; castles in the heart of old villages."

There was one important reason why Louis-Napoleon ordered Paris to be reorganized: the city is too friendly with the uprising. Reportedly, in just one decade, there were 7 times uprising. So the emperor was quickly learned of upheaval in 1848, which brought him to power. The newly built boulevard, in addition to smooth the outflow of people and goods, was also useful to break the concentration of mass in times of protest. Horsemen would be free to infiltrate and disperse the demonstrators, while it was difficult for rioters to hide. Hence Haussmann set hundred meters to the width of the main streets.

But it turned out Haussmann's calculations -- he who believed that the public could be arranged as the laws of physics -- was not always right. The same boulevard actually facilitated the workers to build barricades and control of the town on Paris Commune in 1871, for three months.

But, ever since Boulevard Haussmann was built, laborers, artisans, prostitutes, artists, and anyone who dubbed by the poet Baudelaire as "the underground" suddenly burst into public. Time to go home and go to work was like the boisterous carnival and never subsided, a new panorama in its future. The city was transformed into a "world capital of the nineteenth century".

The rich was not always in contact with the poor. On the streets, fellow citizens looking at each other, often dazed, cynical, often pity; sometimes hostile, sometimes mutually-pity; trade contracts intertwined, there was also murder. Haussman was not making a neutral public space. But intentional or not, It managed to make the rich and the poor aware of their existence. It allowed the class contradiction to be lived as a series of visual experiences encountered by each person each day.






Reading the Paris atmosphere at that time, I remembered my friend's story who visited Dubai several years ago. "No poor people seen in Dubai", he said. "Actually, they are there, but invisible," he added. Dubai Lower class, the majority of migrant workers from South Asia living in slum suburbs, in rooms 3 × 4 inhabited by five to eight people, with no air conditioning in the middle of the air temperature which can reach 50 degrees celsius. It 's not the worst. It's difficult for foreigners to directly contact with migrant workers," he said. 

The city government is smart enough to dispel the poor for not flocking in shopping centers. Friday -- day off  in Dubai -- designated as family day, so that anyone who does not have family is not allowed to enter. For migrant workers who make a living away from home, "the family" is a kind of code: hoboes are banned.

Maybe I do not need to go to Dubai to know how poverty banished from the view, the people who are expelled from the stations in order to look more civilized station, from trains, buses, from city parks that want to look clean. Inequality is a fact that must be refuted.

This city has long been practicing it, and only a matter of time for other cities to emulate. The city which its number of shopping area complicates entry for pedestrians, high property prices urging millions of middle and lower workers to move to the suburbs, with house and land prices continue to climb. Upscale dwellings built with full facilities, so you do not need to come into contact with the squalid villages for daily shopping needs.

In Los Angeles, participation in the public sphere is measured by how much a person can pay the cost of gasoline and internet package to gather and interact; while participation in the economic domain is determined by how big the franchise outlets to supply income to the pockets of building's owners, which are built from public funds.



Who says the political elite do not have a sense of beauty, hm? Marginalized people in Los Angeles know, political regimes and aesthetic regime is rarely apart.

It feels more normal for philanthropy to be the only vehicle for the wealthy, not only to carry out religious orders or avoid taxes, but also to access an authentic experience: to meet poverty. Conversely, the most convenient way of organizing the poor -- they who increasingly removed from centers of knowledge and culture -- is through religious and other primordial sentiments.

Imagining Dubai as "a not too distant future", suddenly, someone like Haussmann looks very progressive.
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