Metropolitics

A Masterpiece in Peril: The Garden Suburb of La Butte-Rouge

Renaud Epstein & translated by Oliver Waine — 2026-02-24T06:00:00Z

La Butte-Rouge, built in the mid-20th century in Paris's southern suburbs, is the archetypal example of a French cité-jardin. In a recent work retracing its history, Élise Guillerm highlights the urban and architectural qualities of this eco-neighborhood before its time, whose very existence is now threatened by an urban renewal project.
Analysis of urban policies, and particularly urban renewal policies, dispels the idea that historical knowledge can prevent the repetition of past mistakes.

- Reviews / urban planning, cité-jardin, HLM, urban heritage, heritage, Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, social housing, sustainable development, garden city, garden suburb, France, Paris region, Paris, history, urban history, environment, urban renewal, landscape

The Paris of Yesteryear: A Photographic Inventory

Pauline Rossi & translated by Oliver Waine — 2024-05-14T05:00:00Z

The Commission du Vieux Paris has kept meticulous records of urban transformations, with its own perception of what constitutes heritage. Since 2022, some 11,000 geolocated photographs from its collection have been made available online, enabling a virtual historic visit of urban renewal projects.
In Paris, a municipal committee called the Commission du Vieux Paris (Old Paris Commission) was created in 1897 to advise the prefecture (covering the former Seine département), and later the city

- From the Field / Paris, history, photography, heritage, urban history, urban heritage

Finding the People's City

Benjamin Holtzman — 2024-03-26T06:00:00Z

In A People's Guide to New York City, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis and Emily Tumpson Molina provide an engaging exploration into sites throughout the city. The authors expose complicated histories, of both iconic and lesser-known sites, that highlight change from below while also demonstrating how powerful institutions have shaped New York in the face of grassroots resistance.
There is no shortage of guidebooks to New York City. There are guides designed to assist visitors in exploring

- Reviews / New York, tourism, urban tourism, history, urban history, resistance, power play, protest, community

What Has Happened in Berlin Since 1989?

Thibaut de Ruyter & Olivier Gaudin & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-06-12T05:00:00Z

Since the fall of the Wall in November 1989, Berlin has metamorphosed into one of the world's most popular urban tourism destinations. Architect, art critic and curator Thibaut de Ruyter has witnessed these transformations firsthand and shares his impressions (originally published in French in 2019) of what has changed in the reunified German capital.
What explains Berlin's attraction as a city?
At the end of the 1980s, the city was something of an island of marginality. This is still the

- Interviews / architecture, history, urban history, memory, Germany, Berlin

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-02-21T06:00:00Z

The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings the industrial towns of the pre-war era back to life—their smells, their health risks, but above all the lives of their inhabitants—offering today's readers a veritable ethnographic immersion into this working-class town.
Although today largely forgotten, except by historians of the working classes, Léon Bonneff was a major figure of social investigation in the early 20th century.

- Reviews / Aubervilliers, Paris, Greater Paris, France, Île-de-France, Paris region, industry, suburbs, banlieue, pollution, health, work, working classes, history, urban history, literature, environment, workers, blue-collar workers, manual workers

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-09-14T05:00:00Z

At the turn of the 20th century, the dramatically poor conditions of urban working-class housing was a cause of major concern in many cities, and would lead to the first social-housing experiments. Photography, then a booming new technology, was one of the means used to document this problem and raise awareness of conditions, as this book on working-class housing in Berlin illustrates.
Taking as their starting point a collection of photographs taken during the first 20 years of the 20th

- Reviews / housing, urban history, social housing, slum, Berlin, Germany, history, affordable housing, photography, working classes, blue-collar workers, manual workers, workers

Haussmann: from modernity to revolution

Jean-Marie Huriot & translated by Oliver Waine — 2013-05-15T08:32:12Z

Jean-Marie Huriot shows how the latest work by geographer David Harvey to be translated into French sheds new light on the major changes that affected Paris from 1848 to 1871. Through a process of creative destruction, “Haussmannisation” brought with it modernity, but also set the stage for the rise of the Paris Commune.
In the tumultuous period of Paris's history that extends from the barricades of 1848 to the bloody repression of the Commune in 1871, profound transformations occurred that

- Reviews / capitalism, urban history, social movement, Paris, Haussmann, Marxism

City Words: An Invitation to Travel

Yves Grafmeyer — 2011-07-13T07:00:00Z

L'aventure des mots de la ville (The Adventure of City Words Through Time, Languages, Societies), tells the story of the use of words, taking the reader through different places, languages, and times in order to evoke the relationship between societies and their cities. This book, which contains a remarkable amount of knowledge, is also an invitation to conduct new investigations into the many paths and perspectives that it opens up.
We can only congratulate and thank the editors and authors

- Reviews / urban research, language, urban history