Radiant City

Visionaries think big: It took Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman to modernize 19th-century Paris, turning it into a city of wide, tree-lined, beautiful and pedestrian-friendly boulevards. And it took architect and city planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret — better know as Le Corbusier — to reconceive bustling, disorderly urban life as a tidy series of urban lives — work life, home life, going out life, errand-running life — divided between compartmentalized mini-environments: high-rise apartment buildings flooded with light and set in broad, open public spaces far from pedestrian-clogged sidewalks, noisy markets, clubs and restaurants separated from workplaces. But t...