Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmanns rebuilding of Paris in 18531870, branded Haussmannization, helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernised, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage.

Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Peter Soppelsa calls secondary Haussmannization, Parisians inverted themrevealed their hidden components to scrutinise their workings and costs for society, environment, and healthand in turn politicised them.

Drawing on French government archives, engineers maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructuresstreets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and riversin Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies.