SPIPI: Tak když už po pár řádcích vidím, co je to zas za text, tak to snad nemusím celý číst, ne? To by mi tady taky jako argument moh jednou přistát Kapitál....

SPIPI: Tomu bych se asi víceméně nebránil, ale musíš si uvědomit, že bulvár takto umístěnej v srdci města má určitý vazby a určitý funkce, který musíš zachovat nebo patřičně kompenzovat.

HAMSTER: se pak nediv, že většině příspěvkům nerozumíš, když nejsi ani ochotnej si přečíst argumentaci oponenta, respektive oponentky.. do pekla s tebou.

MIKATCHOU: tak nějak jsem to myslel, aniž bych kdykoli k tomu cokoli četl - kdo zná trochu historii, tak mu tohle musí být jasný..

obecně proti bulvárům nic moc nemám, jenom si říkám, že když má dojít k rekonstrukci bulváru, a to nemyslim záplatu asfaltu, ale rekonstrukci významnýho charakteru, tak mi prostě přijde dělat z bulváru opět jenom bulvár trochu málo...

Dispossessions
Surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through ‘creative destruction’, which nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this process. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power. He created an urban form where it was believed—incorrectly, as it turned out in 1871—that sufficient levels of surveillance and military control could be attained to ensure that revolutionary movements would easily be brought to heel. Nevertheless, as Engels pointed out in 1872:
In reality, the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called ‘Haussmann’ . . . No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else . . . The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.10
It took more than a hundred years to complete the embourgeoisement of central Paris, with the consequences seen in recent years of uprisings
and mayhem in those isolated suburbs that trap marginalized immigrants, unemployed workers and youth. The sad point here, of course, is that what Engels described recurs throughout history. Robert Moses ‘took a meat axe to the Bronx’, in his infamous words, bringing forth long and loud laments from neighbourhood groups and movements. In the cases of Paris and New York, once the power of state expropriations had been successfully resisted and contained, a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its ‘highest and best use’. Engels understood this sequence all too well:
The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers’ houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected.11

Urban revolutions
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of the first clear, and European-wide, crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour. It struck Paris particularly hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and inequality that had characterized the July Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie violently repressed the revolutionaries but failed to resolve the crisis. The result was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year. To survive politically, he resorted to widespread repression of alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the latter case, this meant the construction of railroads throughout Europe and into the Orient, as well as support for grand works such as the Suez Canal. At home, it meant consolidating the railway network, building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure of Paris. Bonaparte brought in Georges-Eugčne Haussmann to take charge of the city’s public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that his mission was to help solve the surplus-capital and unemployment problem through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris absorbed huge quantities of labour and capital by the standards of the time and, coupled with suppressing the aspirations of the Parisian workforce, was a primary vehicle of social stabilization. He drew upon the utopian plans that Fourierists and Saint-Simonians had debated in the 1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one big difference: he transformed the scale at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them back at him saying: ‘not wide enough . . . you have it 40 metres wide and I want it 120.’ He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighbourhoods such as Les Halles. To do this Haussmann needed new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crédit Mobilier and Crédit Immobilier, which were constructed on Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
The system worked very well for some fifteen years, and it involved not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of life and urban persona. Paris became ‘the city of light’, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafés, department stores, fashion industry and grand expositions all changed urban living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the overextended and speculative financial system and credit structures crashed in 1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against Bismarck’s Germany and lost. In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune, one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history, wrought in part out of a nostalgia for the world that Haussmann had destroyed and the desire to take back the city on the part of those dispossessed by his works.2
Fast forward now to the 1940s in the United States. The huge mobilization for the war effort temporarily resolved the capital-surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s, and the unemployment that went with it. But everyone was fearful about what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous: the federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, while strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As in Louis Bonaparte’s era, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time; the subsequent history of McCarthyism and Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is all too familiar. On the economic front, there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed.
In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann’s efforts appeared in Architectural Forum. It documented in detail what he had done, attempted an analysis of his mistakes but sought to recuperate his reputation as one of the greatest urbanists of all time. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after the Second World War did to New York what Haussmann had done to Paris.3 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process. Through a system of highways and infrastructural transformations, suburbanization and the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole metropolitan region, he helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption problem. To do this, he tapped into new financial institutions and tax arrangements that liberated the credit to debt-finance urban expansion. When taken nationwide to all the major metropolitan centres of the us—yet another transformation of scale—this process played a crucial role in stabilizing global capitalism after 1945, a period in which the us could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy by running trade deficits.
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MIKATCHOU: :-)))) zajímavé, to je pro mě novinka.

MIKATCHOU: Ten "třídní podtext" mě zajímá, můžeš to upřesnit?

SPIPI: jistěže patří, Haussmannova renovace Paříže měla zcela jasný militaristický, mocenský a třídní podtext .) - bulvárem ti holt armáda projde snáze než středověkou uličkou .)

A nepatřej bulváry (v té klasické podobě) tak trochu do minulýho století?

MIKATCHOU: Jeden z těch slavnejch návrhů, imho dost nepovedenej (pokus o nesmyslnou maximalizaci chodníku, což si vyžádalo posunutí vozovky a když k tomu přidáš tramvajovou trať tak ti kolem Václava moc místa nezbyde)...

SMALLRICCIO: tak vidíš - když ne poplatky, tak uplně zrušit přístup pro auta :) koukám, že jsi větší radikál než já! imho v Praze by opravdu mohlo být víc pěších zon...

HAMSTER: proboha co to je za vizualizaci? to je fakt blbej projekt, dyt by si tam už lidi nemohli ani dojít sednout na Václava... centrální bod, místo všech setkání a srazů, by nebyl přístupný jinak než ze silnice? to je pěkná hovadina...

Na tomhle obrázku je sterilní mrtvý místo a já nemám sterilní mrtvý místa rád.

SMALLRICCIO: No to je právě ten odlišnej pohled na věc - tenhle hektar prázdný dlaždy je přesně to, co mě děsí. :-) Taky si umím představit pár úprav Václaváku (např. proč nejsou na tom středovým pruhu stromy?), ale bulvár s vjezdem jen na propustku mi připadá docela bizardní nápad (jako by nestačilo, že máme bulvár coby slepou ulici, to je asi taky světovej unikát).

SMALLRICCIO: Bulvár řešenej jako pěší zóna? Originální nápad....

SMALLRICCIO: Mě teda představa megaobří pěší zóny moc neláká, ale asi máme o ideálním městě jiné představy. Mě se líbí rušná živá města, prázdné pusté klidné pěší zóny se skupinkami turistů mě děsí....