Many of the Paris Arcades, which were built in the 1820s, were destroyed to make way for the grand boulevards built by Napoléon III’s urban architect, Baron Georges- Eugène Haussman, but several remain. In the arcades, Benjamin saw elements that ran counter to utopian thinking, but also elements that accorded with it.
In the background of Benjamin’s thinking were the views of contemporary German sociologists, such as Ferdinand Tönnies, who viewed the growth of modern metropolises with alarm for destroying the security of small-town community life by making people anony- mous to one another. Against them stood the minority voice of Georg Simmel, who saw nothing wrong with urban anonymity, which freed people from the weight of tradition and intrusive public scrutiny, thus contributing to the vitality of cities.