Why it looks like this

Much of what looks like "Paris" on this map is surgery. Between 1853 and 1870, city prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann demolished large parts of the medieval city to push straight boulevards through it — for light, for sewers, for traffic, and for armies to move where street barricades once went up.

The signature is the star: twelve avenues meeting at the Arc de Triomphe. Around it, the boulevards follow older rings — the traces of city walls that came before.