Originally published on Verso’s Blog, 11th April 2018

There are few urbanists today who know their city as intimately as Paris’s popular historian, publisher and organic intellectual, Eric Hazan. He’s the only writer I’m aware of whose books have indexes for street names. But Hazan doesn’t just know Paris’s backstreets and inner courtyards: this guy seems to know all the names on doorbells, too. Since The Invention of Paris, he’s been knocking on doors and listening to footsteps, harking paeans to his hometown under fire. Hazan takes leave from one of Balzac’s remarks: “old Paris is disappearing with a frightening rapidity.” Balzac is one of Hazan’s heroes, and like the great nineteenth-century creator, Hazan himself isn’t so much a realist portrayer as an urban visionary, an observer of a Paris to come. He’s not one to go in search of lost time, nor even lost steps. Lost steps? There…