Is Buenos Aires bigger than Paris?

The advantage of having With Google Maps at your fingertips, whether on your PC or mobile phone, and various sites dedicated to comparing almost anything, there are plenty of “competitions” to see if one city is more beautiful, clean, safe or large than another.

For example, the Buenos Aires Local Tours site superimposes maps taken from Google to compare the Argentine capital with other cities around the world in terms of its surface area.

In the case of London , it is noteworthy that Plaza de Mayo is approximately where London Bridge is, which places Plaza Dorrego near Waterloo, Caminito in Peckham and Plaza Italia on the other side of Regents Park in Primrose Hill. In any case, London is a much larger city than Buenos Aires, with some 1,500 km2.

New York and Los Angeles are also larger than Buenos Aires, not including their endless surrounding areas. New York is 783 km2 and Los Angeles is 1,299 km2. The comparison with Paris may be surprising.

Paris was once a dirty place, full of disease. Then Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to change things. “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where poverty, plague and disease work together,” says Victor Considerant in Social Destiny (1837).

Although it may be hard to believe, as the Tomorrow City website says, “Haussmann was not a town planner, nor an architect, nor did he have any specific training in urban design. In fact, he studied law. But Haussmann was, above all, a baron in the service of the emperor, whose favour he enjoyed.

When Napoleon III commissioned Haussmann to reform Paris, he opted for wide avenues where it was not possible to entrench oneself or to fight the authorities. He lined them with housing full of middle-class people and sent the workers to peripheral neighbourhoods. The rich, previously relegated to the faubourgs, returned to the centre, which was now hygienic.

Aesthetically, Paris is now noted for its uniformity , although before Haussmann its centre was mainly medieval. Haussmann was one of the precursors of ordinances on the appearance of facades. He adored order (including social order) and monumentality .

This is why many of the city's current facades look identical. With his reforms, Haussmann intended to regulate the proper use of space through regulations . From the point of view of public space, the reforms consisted of demolishing a large part of the buildings of old Paris to build large avenues oriented towards speed and "free circulation".

“As a baron, Haussmann could not stand the mixing of classes. He did so as long as the poor did not cause any disturbance and performed their duties diligently and quietly. In Haussmann’s Paris, the very poor were confined to the outskirts and the not so poor to attics without elevators,” the site adds.

A simple analysis shows that Haussmann exchanged cholera for widespread environmental pollution. The introduction of the avenues coincided with (or prompted) a shift towards polluting mobility .

Today, Paris is still trying to reverse many of the actions initiated by Haussmann, giving priority to pedestrians and removing powers from private vehicles, promoting slow mobility and a city of proximity. The 15-minute city is eminently Parisian.

In terms of surface area, always without considering the surroundings, Paris has 105 km2, almost half that of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (that is, the city constrained by General Paz and the Río de la Plata).