Inverting Haussmannization

Peter S. Soppelsa is an assistant professor in the University of Oklahoma Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His research combines environmental and urban history with the history of technology to explore the past of infrastructures, public works, public health, and the everyday experience of urban environments and technologies.

This marvelous book provides critical insight into the relationships between technology, society, and the urban environment in a modernizing Paris. Peter S. Soppelsa lays bare the visible and invisible aspects of the infrastructure that shaped both the form and the human experience of the city’s vertical, spatial, and subterranean geographies. The result is an essential portrait of the uneven reach of Paris’s infrastructures of transportation, sanitation, and organization, which both reflected and reinforced novel inequalities.