Saving eastern Paris from decline: the urban highway as a technocratic utopia for urban renewal

This article examines the utopian scope of urban highways by analyzing a specific infrastructure project and the opposition it has encountered. To this end, the research focuses on Paris and its highway plan, based on a study of the ‘north-south axis’. Designed during the Trente Glorieuses (the thirty glorious years of economic growth in France), this axis was ultimately abandoned in the late 1970s. The only completed sections are the Right Bank Expressway and the Ring Road. Studying the abandonment of the North-South Axis reveals the conflict between the infrastructure project and the limitations of its conception, as well as its inability to adapt to the ideological and urban changes taking place in France in the late 1960s. The projection of a future embodied by modernist objects, the myth of speed and the utopia of ‘time saved’ were all undermined by opposition to the project. By recounting the history of this contested and ultimately cancelled infrastructure project, we are recounting the history of the crisis of a technical utopia and the imaginary of conquest and progress that constitutes it.