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This paper is inspired by the concept of “landscapes of power” coined by Sharon Zukin. She contends that the policies aimed at preserving or enhancing the urban landscape may foster social transformations. Changes in the appearance of a landscape, or in the way people look at it, may cause or at least contribute to changes in the population. This is illustrated with landscape regulations that have taken shape in Paris following the so-called “return of the street”, which Jane Jacobs most contributed to promote. As elaborated in Paris in the 1970s, those policies followed two objectives: protecting the Parisian traditional landscape, and maintaining the life and atmosphere of popular neighbourhoods. Thirty years later, it appears that the “return of the street” has fostered the gentrification process of many popular neighbourhoods, and the eviction of the population whose presence once seemed so attractive.