Important Highway Asset Management Lessons from the Boulevards of Paris

You might have read the article “The revolution that built the streets of Paris” that BBC Future published.

It dealt with the urban plan Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann created during the Second French Empire, which resolved the congested and complicated layout of medieval roadways.

He designed the bold Boulevards of Paris, which posits as both a famous infrastructure landmark and presents valuable lessons in urban planning.

In the study “Self-organization versus top-down planning in the evolution of a city,” Marc Barthelemy and colleagues of CEA Institute of Theoretical Physics, Gif-sur-Yvette analyzed maps of the city road network in several eras starting from the Revolution to 2010 (1789, 1826, 1836, 1888, 1999 and 2010).

The study examined the characteristics of the networks, which include the number of intersections and edges.

It applied more revolutionary ideas from the current theory of complex networks, which includes the quantity called “betweenness centrality” (BC), which measures the importance of individual nodes to navigating the network.

The BBC Future article and the study are highly recommended for your added knowledge in urban spatial design.  Just click on the links to the mentioned resource for further readings on the impacts of spatial designs on urban networks.

Those who follow infrastructure asset management practice will appreciate reading about the creation of new analysis tools to find solutions to spatial and urban design challenges.

Indeed, it’s quite interesting to learn from the past urban design of the Great Paris as we continue to deal with managing infrastructure renewal and deployment that affects mobility and continuous provision of services that modern cities required.