Can One Man Change the Shape of an Entire City?

Cities are often studied as a kind of organism, a complex entity capable of evolving, and ruled by self-organization. Which raises an awkward question for urban planners: Where do they fit in? If cities evolve in size and shape according to their own unwritten rules, does "central planning" really change anything?

Several French academics recently analyzed one of the most obvious case studies for this elusive question: Paris in the time before and after infamous master-planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann rolled through town razing roads, plotting new ones, and trying to rationalize the city's windy medieval street grid (hat tip to the BBC for noticing the study). The paper in Scientific Reports digitized historic maps of the city from 1789, 1826, 1836, 1888, 1999, and 2010.