The Heroic City: Paris 1945 - 1958

Rosemary Wakeman's The Heroic City is a fascinating account of how Paris’s public spaces came back to life after the Nazi occupation. Wakeman finds that the city’s streets overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle.

"I discovered Paris as an Heroic City while researching newspapers from the 1950s," Wakeman says. "I suddenly realized that there was a vibrant, extraordinary public world in Paris that had never really been talked about or seen. Uncovering the films, photographs, the memories was sheer pleasure."

Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., is director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham. She teaches courses on the European City, World’s Fairs, Maritime Cities, the Social History of Architecture. She also teaches as an Invited Professor at the Institut d'urbanisme de Paris at the University of Paris XII.

She is also the author of Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse 1945-1975 (Harvard University Press, 1998). She is editor of Themes in Modern European History, 1945 to the Present (Routledge, 2003). Wakeman writes regularly for the Revue Urbanisme, most recently an article on the New York mega-region (no. 368, Sept.Oct.2009). She has published numerous articles on urban history and on cities, including a recent special issue of French Politics, Culture & Society on “The Renovation of Les Halles” in Paris (Summer 2007). She also co-edited (with Charles Rearick) a special issue on Paris for French Historical Studies (Winter 2004). She writes frequently on urban waterfronts and is currently working on an article about the redevelopment of Mission Bay in San Francisco. Her current project is an intellectual history of the New Town Movement in Europe and the United States. Wakeman is also co-editor (with Dorothee Brantz) of the Metropolitan Studies series published by Berghahn Books.