Your City Needs A Super Hero.Who /What is it?

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by aquablue

NY needed Haussman. A true urban super hero.

Somebody to make that city look prettier and no boring grid.. Imagine Manhattan looking like Paris... it would be very nice.

Well, I'm sure the Haussmannian era was discussed on here several times, but maybe not in depth. It's still controversial and highly debatable.
The problem is it took a dictatorial and corrupt far-right regime for Haussmann to implement his plan over Paris. That's how he could demolish some large crime-ridden crumbling areas from the Middle Ages to build better things for the local bourgeoisie back then.

It's not that Haussmann himself would really be questionable in my opinion. He was just a senior official from Alsace who grew a skillful urban planner from being the prefect of Bordeaux before being appointed over the Paris region, still as a prefect. The guy just had an opportunity to achieve spectacular things, then he told himself - ok, let's do this thing.
But then, there was dictatorship over the country, which of course wouldn't make way to any kind of democratic NIMBYism. If you disagreed with Napoleon III's regime, you simply were likely to be deported to French Guiana to die over there in prison.
You'll admit that it's not a kind of regime that should be advertised, even though it was a very convenient way to screw NIMBYism.

I bet Napoleon III's dictatorship was a role model to Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile and a few others of that kind.
We'd rather stick to fair democracy and deal with NIMBYism by different means such as education, quite frankly.