If you’re a fan of Paris, you’re aware of Baron Haussmann, who most consider the architect of modern Paris. In the mid-1850s, Napoleon III (nephew of the Napoleon) wanted Paris to be a city with better housing, more sanitary quartiers, better traffic flow, and streets broad enough for artillery to navigate if necessary but too broad for rebels to barricade. He commissioned Baron Haussmann to begin a program of reforms, and his work transformed much of the medieval city in only seventeen years.
Some of the projects Haussman gets credit for include the opera house (L’Opera Garnier), developments and improvements in parks, a new water supply, 348 miles of new sewers, 
redesign of place de l’Etoile (around the Arc de Triomphe), transformation of 60% of Paris’ buildings, covered shopping arcades or passages, and 56 miles of roads creating the long and grand avenues that fan out all over the Paris we know today.When walking down these avenues, you are struck by the uniform height of the buildings—another element of his plan. Haussman buildings are seven stories and usually have balconies off the 2nd and 3rd stories (which, in America, are the 3nd and 4th floors). Haussman also gets “credit” for displacing many poor Parisians when he tore down 20,000 houses to build 40,000. Many of those people escaped outside the city limits (at that time) to Montmartre.
Haussmann’s plan for Paris was inspiration for future city planners. The cities of London and Moscow display his influences as well as the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which included his diagonal street
designs. He has a street named after him in Paris, of course—Boulevard Haussmann—and he is buried in the famous Pere-Lachaise cemetery here.This is a picture of Haussmann's statue at one end of--Boulevard Haussmann, of course.
