City dwellers

Christian Century, July 12, 2003 by Myles Alexander

IN THE LANGUAGE of New Urbanism, Philip Bess has introduced some implications of taking the built environment seriously ("Design matters," April 19). But Bess's take on New Urbanism has an Achilles' heel: it assumes that the people of the U.S. are inheritors of an urban tradition.

Though urbanized, the U.S. is not an urban culture. Most Anglo-European ancestors came from farms and villages, and Bess describes a historic urbanist attachment to a common place and multilayered life that may have existed in those villages. But those urban qualities were lost when immigrants settled on scattered farms in a different natural environment.

U.S. cultural identity is agrarian. We talk in terms of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian elite and Andrew Jackson's frontier democracies--not a democracy of the urbanite Benjamin Franklin. Many Americans in cities and sprawling suburbs are still only one or two generations away from the farm, and clog freeways each weekend in flight from both city and suburb.

To arrive at humane, just and ecologically respectful urban development, we need to rediscover the courage and joy of the early urban Christian communities we know in scripture and other historic writings, as well as their practices of radical inclusiveness and servanthood.

Myles Alexander

Fergus Falls, Minn.

Philip Bess replies:

Myles Alexander makes two points: first, that the prevailing cultural ideal in the U.S. is not--and arguably has never been--urban; and second, that Christian communities should be joyful, courageous, inclusive and engaged in active service.

I agree with the latter point, but must ask: What formal ordering principles of human settlement follow from this imperative? The locus of the normative Christian communities to which he alludes was either traditional urban or traditional village, both characterized by a physical structure and a mix of activities based upon the physiology of the (walking) human person--a physical structure in marked contrast to that of the postwar automobile suburb.

Regarding the former point, I would simply observe that although the historic American cultural ideal has indeed been agrarian, this ideal until recently has coexisted with genuinely good traditional towns and cities (which remain living environments of choice for many). The problem today is that the prevailing American cultural ideal has become suburban, embodied in law and institutional habit--and that postwar suburbia has as little to do with an agrarian ideal as it does with an urban (and Christian) ideal. It remains true, however, that compact mixed-use traditional neighborhoods and towns, aside from their own intrinsic merits, are also the foremost ways to preserve the pastoral and agricultural landscape.