Toulouse is one of the most striking examples of urban modernization both in France and in all of Europe. It exemplifies the unparalleled changes that transformed France into an urban nation after World War II.

In Modernizing the Provincial City, Rosemary Wakeman examines the ways in which urban landscape and architecture, culture, and economic life were altered by public modernization programs designed to build "the new France." Her study is unique in treating modernization not in the conventional sense of a fixed, abstract model superimposed on defenseless provincial cities, but rather as a matter of unpredictable change.