But the Interstates weren&#x27;t specifically designed to give an advantage to the government in street fighting. Haussmann&#x27;s boulevards were designed for easy access for artillery (and cavalry?), and to make barricade-construction impossible, as vonnik noted -- not to facilitate movement and redeployment like the Interstates. (I&#x27;ve heard the rumor that the Interstates were meant to facilitate suburbia from the start -- on the theory that if the country&#x27;s population and economic activity spread out into the suburbs, we&#x27;d be harder to ruin with a small number of nuclear weapons.)<p>That said, Robert Moses was certainly a tyrant of urban planning on the same level as Haussmann. White ethnic populations of the Northeast still remember him, and have not yet forgiven him for his habit of running freeways through their neighborhoods -- ruining the neighborhoods in the process, and in many cases driving them out to the ethnically-homogenous blandness of the suburbs.<p>I&#x27;m also reminded of Le Corbousier. Architecture can certainly attract autocrats...