This document provides an overview of a reader article presented by Nurahmed M. about Marshal Berman's writings on "The Family of Eyes" and "The Mire of the Macadam" from his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. It then discusses Berman's analysis of how Georges-Eugène Haussmann redeveloped Paris in the 1850s-1870s by cutting wide boulevards throughout the city, and the lessons that planning approach provided about the power of civil servants to transform urban landscapes.

1. “The Family of Eyes” and
“The Mire of the Macadam”
Presented By: Nurahmed M.

2. from All That is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (1982)
• This reader article is delivered by Marshal Berman, who is a Distinguished Professor
of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY),
• where he teaches political philosophy and urbanism.
• His other writings include “The Politics of Authenticity” (New York: Athenaeum,
1970), republished by Verso (2010);
• “On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square” (New York: Random
House, 2006); and
• “New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg” (London: Reaktion, 2007), co-edited
with Brian Berge.

3. Introduction
• By the mid-nineteenth century, after industrial revolution, cities had become extremely
crowded, especially those contained by protective city walls, such as Paris and Barcelona.
• In 1853 through 1870, Georges Eugène Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine during the rule
of Napoleon III, implemented large-scale public works in Paris that included carving wide
boulevards.
• Those boulevards linked important public places – train stations, public markets, civic
buildings, and parks using Baroque axial planning ideas. Municipal sewer is installed
under them, and they were bounded by 6 story buildings sporting empire-style façades
and mansard roofs.
• Ground floors of these buildings held cafés and restaurants.
• Haussmann’s Paris has been much criticized on the rightful grounds that it displaced
large numbers of mostly poor people, and that it was an expression of political power
meant to clear out working-class neighborhoods that were hotbeds ofresistance and made
it easier for Napoleon’s troops to move through the city and break up political unrest.

4. How Berman looks into Haussmann New Urban
Model
• Urban public social life could develop,
• Dense surrounding neighborhoods spilled out onto the boulevards.
• Then, he forced the middle and upper classes to confront the reality of
urban working-class poverty,
• beginnings of modern traffic into the city, because their wide and
unencumbered roadways allowed private carriages to move at much
faster speeds than previously possible.

5. Lesson to be taken is …
• The power of an appointed civil servant to transform
a cityscape.
• This lesson influence other civil servants and
planning commissioners or planners from allover the
world, like New York, Boston, San Francisco and
Vancouver.

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