Agenda

Talk by Prof. Dr. Allan Potofsky: The Origins of “Greater Paris?” Delimiting, appropriating, and reforming the stone quarries in the outer boundaries of Paris in the eighteenth-century.

Organization by Teodoro Katinis (Dep. of Literary Studies – GEMS) and Elizabeth Merrill (Dep. of Architecture – Sarton Center for the History of Science)

In the years leading to this summer’s Olympics, Parisian and the Île de France regional authorities wielded broad municipal authority to redeploy the Seine for ceremonial and sporting events as well as post-industrial quarters in the outer suburbs for housing and transport. Starting in the eighteenth century, urban reform featured a similar restructuring of the capital city’s core and periphery. Eighteenth-century Paris was a time and a place where urban space was deftly reassigned from historically determined spaces where specific trades had traditionally gravitated:  displaced activities included market spaces (increasingly confined to Les Halles) and the leatherwork and chemical works (moved from the Seine to la Bièvre). What a later generation would call zoning, the geographic fixing of life and work to demarcated areas, was practiced in an embryonic form during the ancien régime.

However, some industries were clearly not transplantable. In his paper, Allan Potofsky examines the reforms of the end of the ancien régime that sought to limit the risk presented by an archetypically unmovable industrial site: the stone quarries situated in much of the outer zones of the capital, particularly, in the areas of Montmartre, Belleville, and Ménilmontant in the North and Northeast of Paris. Collapsing buildings and industrial accidents alerted authorities to the hazards of open stone quarries in proximity to encroaching residential areas, rapidly expanding as the overpopulated city grew desperate for livable space. The porousness of Paris and its outer perimeters first posed the challenge of the limitless city, well before the contemporary idea of a Greater Paris was born.

Allan Potofsky (PhD Columbia University, 1993) is an urban historian who specializes in the history of planning and construction of early modern Paris. He is particularly interested in the relationship between social and architectural history, political economy, and intellectual history. He is currently Professeur des universités and was previously Maître de conferences at the Université Paris-8. As a sequel to his Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), his current book project is entitled Paris is the World: the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It focuses on the politics of urban reform, techniques of organization and construction, and the material culture (particularly, the interplay of property right, labor, and resources) that shaped the city in the century before Haussmannisation.