Excitement about the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics is sweeping our own nation’s capital, as it is in so many places around the world. Here at the Library of Congress, we’re certainly marking the occasion. The Informal Learning Office (ILO) recently hosted an Olympics-themed Family Day, and afterward they published a blog post about it where you can see a collection of photographs and information about Library collections related to the Olympic Games past and present. One of the offerings listed in their post is a 2024 Summer Olympics display in the Jefferson building that features some Geography and Map Division collection items, maps of past Olympic host cities made to commemorate their Games at the time! You can see that display on the second floor of the Jefferson building through the end of August, after this year’s Olympic Games wind down.
While the Olympics come and go, they famously have lasting impacts on a city’s layout and infrastructure. A recent example that made a huge positive difference for my family was the massive expansion of public transportation ahead of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. Traveling from one end of Rio to another can be nightmarish in traffic if you have to go by car or bus, and as a child I remember that it sometimes felt like an arduous journey to get from my great-aunt’s apartment in Zona Sul (the South Zone beaches) to my uncle’s house in Zona Norte (the dense historic city center of the North Zone). But by the mid-2010s, Rio had shiny new metro lines and stations that dwarfed its original design from the 1970s, which revolutionized how I get around to see family and my favorite places when I’m visiting. The city also opened a series of tramlines starting in 2012, which connect one of Rio’s airports with various points in the city center. Funnily enough, the city’s tram authority says directly on their website that they’re hearkening back to a much earlier generation of trams and street cars that dotted Rio’s now car-crammed roads until the 1960s. We even have a map of the early 20th century street cars and trams of Rio de Janeiro in our collection.
Truly, what’s old is new again! In fact, as we’ve explored on this blog before, major urban upgrades predate the modern Olympic Games by a long shot. Paris’s efforts to clean up the River Seine ahead of the current Games has made the news repeatedly, sometimes poking fun. However, Paris has managed such cleanup efforts before. The wide boulevards and colonnaded buildings that we imagine when we think of Paris today are the result of massive urban planning and revitalization in the late 19th century, as one of my colleagues wrote in a previous post, Exploring Haussmannian Paris. Reservoirs and aqueducts that redirected filthy water away from the river were part of that effort as well, cleaning up centuries-old pollution problems.
The Haussmannian renovation of Paris was the result of an imperial ambition to define a grand, modern capital city, the momentous culmination of over a century of planning. However, if you’re familiar with Washington, D.C. history, you know that Paris wasn’t the only grand capital city planned out by a French designer!
Another colleague of mine wrote about the role of Pierre L’Enfant, who spent the last years of the 18th century designing the layout of the new capital city: Francophone Folly in the Capital City. Recently, she and the version of L’Enfant’s map pictured above were featured in a local news segment about L’Enfant’s expansive vision for D.C. as a majestic series of interlinking wide avenues, with sweeping spaces for the seat of newly minted American power. As she details in her post, he didn’t get credit for his vision for a long time, but fortunately for all of us who live and/or work here, his plan was what came to pass. Like Paris, D.C. has a deliberate structure that gives it striking features and easily recognizable landmarks.
Modern-day Paris is no stranger to big urban plans, and I for one am curious to see what long-term changes result from the current Olympic Games.
Learn More
- For more maps and history of Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Olympics, see my colleague’s blog post from that time: Olympic City: Rio de Janeiro in Historical Maps
Source: https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2024/07/urban-planning-legends/