20th-Century Urban Planning
The Man Who Wanted to Demolish Paris
In 1925, a Swiss-French architect presented a plan to tear down the historic centre of Paris and replace it with 18 identical glass skyscrapers — and the French establishment almost let him do it.
The Idea
Le Corbusier believed the city was a machine, and that most existing cities were broken ones. His 'Plan Voisin' proposed erasing a vast swathe of central Paris north of the Seine and rebuilding it as a grid of cruciform towers set in open parkland — uniform, rational, efficient. He called the street a dying thing and described traditional urban density as fundamentally hostile to human life. What's easy to miss, looking back, is how seductive this vision was to serious people. The early 20th century had genuine urban crises: overcrowding, tuberculosis, inadequate light and ventilation, sanitation failures. Le Corbusier wasn't dreaming in a vacuum — he was responding to real suffering with an engineer's confidence. His error wasn't caring about human welfare; it was believing that complexity could be solved by erasure. The tragedy is that his ideas didn't stay on paper. The planning orthodoxy he helped create — separate zones for living, working, and leisure; towers in parkland; the primacy of the car — became the template for social housing projects from Marseille to Chicago to Mumbai. The results were frequently the opposite of what was promised: not thriving communities, but isolated ones, stripped of the street-level density that makes urban life actually function. The city as machine turned out to be a city that didn't work for the people inside it.
In the World
Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis is perhaps the most documented casualty of this philosophy. Completed in 1956, the complex comprised 33 towers housing nearly 15,000 people, designed by Minoru Yamasaki — who would later design the original World Trade Center — according to the planning principles Le Corbusier had evangelised. Generous floor-to-ceiling heights, abundant light, skip-stop elevator systems to encourage communal interaction on 'gallery floors'. On paper it was progressive. Within a decade it had become a byword for urban failure. The skip-stop galleries became sites of crime rather than community. The open ground between towers — in theory, liberated green space — offered no natural surveillance, no shops, no reason to linger. The design had optimised for a theory of how people should live rather than observing how they actually did. Maintenance funding collapsed, vacancy rates soared, and in 1972 the city began demolishing the towers, finishing the job by 1976. The architectural critic Charles Jencks famously called the first demolition blast, on July 15, 1972, the death of modern architecture. That's a little theatrical — but it captures something real. Pruitt-Igoe didn't fail because the residents were the wrong kind of people, as contemporaries sometimes implied. It failed because the design eliminated everything that makes a neighbourhood self-sustaining: mixed use, human scale, the accidental sociability of the corner and the stoop.
Why It Matters
Urban planning rarely announces itself as ideology, but it always is. Every decision about where to put a road, how tall a building should be, whether to zone a neighbourhood for single use — these are arguments about how human life should be organised, made permanent in concrete and steel. The Le Corbusier story is a useful corrective to a particular kind of confidence: the belief that if you understand a system well enough, you can redesign it from scratch and improve it. Cities resisted this not because people are irrational, but because urban life is genuinely complex in ways that resist top-down optimisation. The things that make a street feel alive — the mix of old and new buildings, the small business that only survives in cheap older premises, the overlapping flows of people at different hours — are precisely the things that comprehensive redevelopment destroys. When you walk through a city now and feel the difference between a block that hums and one that feels dead, you're often feeling the legacy of a planning decision made decades ago. Noticing that is the first step toward asking better questions about the ones being made today.
A Question to Ponder
When experts genuinely believe they are improving lives, what stops good intentions from becoming the justification for harm?
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