When I was at university, in my third year of a history degree, I wrote an essay about the Champs-Élysées, that most storied of avenues. It wasn’t so much the history, but about the philosophy of the space. The French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre divided space into three distinct but linked categories: the perceived, conceived and lived; or the physical, mental and social.
The perceived space is an elegant avenue through the heart of Paris, which is also quite similar to the conceived space, although its architects would not have imagined its use as a dual-carriageway through the French capital
