Une ville des jardins: The Consiglio d’Ornato and the Urban Transformation of Nice (1832

This article examines the urban transformation of Nice in the early nineteenth century. It does so using the papers of the Consiglio d’Ornato (1832-1860), an urban planning committee charged with overseeing the development of the city at a time of demographic and economic growth brought about by tourism. This article argues that the Consiglio cooperated with private speculators to create a city rooted in a series of myths—Orientalist, Greco-Roman, and early Christian—that both shaped and were shaped by the expectations of world-wearied tourists. Nice was turned into a commodity whose purpose was to provide tourists with a feeling of fleeing a modern world characterized by instability and inauthenticity. Paradoxically, as a direct result, Nice became one of the earliest cities to experience a modern form of consumer capitalism in which people, places, cultures, and nature itself were packaged and peddled to the leisured classes