Though it’s easily forgotten in our age of air travel and instantaneous global communication, many a great city is located where it is because of a river. That holds true everywhere from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to New York — and even to Los Angeles, despite its own once-uncontrollable river having long since been turned into a much-ridiculed concrete drainage channel. But no urban waterway has been quite so romanticized for quite so long as the Seine, which runs through the middle of Paris. And it was in the middle of the Seine, on the now-aptly named Île de la Cité, that Paris began. In the 3D time-lapse video above, you can witness the nearly two-and-a-half-millennium evolution of that tiny settlement into the capital we know today in just three minutes.
Paris didn’t take its shape in a simple process of outward growth. As is visible from high above through the video’s animation, the city has grown differently in each era of its existence, whether it be that of the Parisii, the tribe from whom it takes its name; of the Roman Empire, which constructed the standard Cardo Maximus (now known as the Rue Saint-Jacques) and Decumanus Maximus, among much other infrastructure; the Middle Ages, amid whose great (and haphazard) densification rose Notre-Dame de Paris; or the time of Baron Haussmann, whose radical urban renovations laid waste to great swathes of medieval Paris and replaced them with the broad avenues, stately residential buildings, and grand monuments recognized around the world today.
At first glance, the built environment of modern Paris can seem to have been frozen in Haussmann’s mid-nineteenth century — and no doubt, that’s just the way its countless many tourists might want it. But as shown in the video, the Ville Lumière has kept changing throughout the industrial era, and hasn’t stopped in the succeeding “globalization era.” More growth and transformation has lately taken place outside central Paris, beyond the encircling Boulevard Périphérique, but it would hardly do justice to history to ignore such more relatively recent, more divisive additions as the Tour Montparnasse, the Centre Pompidou, or the Louvre Pyramid. (When it was built in the eighteen-eighties, even the beloved Eiffel Tower drew a great deal of ire and disdain.) And though the venerable Notre-Dame may have stood on Île de la Cité since the fourteenth century, the thoroughgoing reconstruction that followed its 2019 fire has made it belong just as much to the twenty-first.
Related content:
A 3D Animated History of Paris: Take a Visual Journey from Ancient Times to 1900
How Paris Became Paris: The Story Behind Its Iconic Squares, Bridges, Monuments & Boulevards
A 3D Animation Reveals What Paris Looked Like When It Was a Roman Town
Take an Aerial Tour of Medieval Paris
The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes
An Animated History of Versailles: Six Minutes of Animation Show the Construction of the Grand Palace Over 400 Years
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
