Design matters: the city and the good life: can the art of traditional urban design be renewed, and can we relearn how to create beautiful and livable cities?

Christian Century, April 19, 2003 by Philip Bess

WESTERN IDEAS ABOUT good cities descend from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. From Athens we inherit two seminal ideas: that the good life is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city is one that makes this good life possible for its citizens. From Jerusalem comes a third idea: that a city's excellence is also measured by the care it exhibits for its weakest members. And from Rome we inherit the idea that a city's beauty is warranted by and represents its greatness. This ancient view of cities, though it acknowledged the central role of commerce, was essentially moral and aesthetic.

Today's common wisdom is different. It views the city as governed by impersonal market forces, and devotes little thought to the good life or to the relation cities might have to the good life.

The city is a central metaphor and theme in Christianity. Christian scripture depicts the end of the human pilgrimage as a heavenly city, the New Jerusalem; and the relationship between this world and the next was articulated paradigmatically for Christians in the fifth century in St. Augustine's classic The City of God.

Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for human beings is lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polls. This "city-state" was typically small in scale, with flexible but definite physical and geographic characteristics. It happened also to approximate the size of subsequent historic towns and urban neighborhoods--and for an obvious reason: it is an area that can be comfortably walked. Its size fit the embodied nature of the human person. Of the polis Aristotle wrote that it is a community of communities, "the highest of all, embracing all the rest ... [aiming] at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens."

The Christian might say that Aristotle is not quite right on this point. The church is the highest of all communities, for it aims at the truly highest good: people's eternal well-being. Augustine addresses this tension in a way that became definitive for Christians. He contended that in its life on earth, the church is but a single member of and participant in that community of communities which is the earthly city. With respect to its divine vocation, however, the church represents and to some extent embodies the heavenly city. Pace Aristotle, the highest of all communities therefore is indeed a city: it is the City of God, of which the church is its earthly herald, symbol and sacramental anticipation. Christians recognize that on earth we have no lasting city but seek the city that is to come. Christians therefore possess a dual citizenship.

Aristotle argued that human beings are by nature social animals that thrive in cities. Historically, Christians have agreed, but maintain that human sociability reflects the inherent sociability of the one triune God. It is important therefore not to regard Augustine's use of the term city as mere metaphor. Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Brown (writing about the classical polis and Augustine respectively) have emphasized that in the premodern world human identity was bound up with particular communities and particular places. (This indeed was essential to the appeal of Augustine's thesis: Christians belong to a city, a heavenly city--God's city.)

And it is worth noting that the modern disintegration of the traditional city, which I will shortly describe, coincides with the (now disintegrating) modern notion of the self as disembodied and ahistorical. We might recall that the frequently used metaphor "the church in the public square" derives from the historic presence of real churches on real public squares. The power of this metaphor diminishes as we lose and forget how to make real public squares fronted by real churches.

Urban social life as both reality and ideal became problematic with the rise of the industrial city. As recently as the 18th century Samuel Johnson could say of London: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the urban setting became known as the site of disease, pollution, crime, squalor and ugliness. William Blake wrote of England's "dark satanic mills," and Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times describes the prototypical industrial city of Coketown in terms more hellish than heavenly.

Every urban reform movement of the past 200 years--from England's Hygiene Acts to America's City Beautiful Movement to modern zoning laws to modernist architecture to the creation of public housing and the rise of environmentalism and historic preservation--has been a response to the social and cultural problems created by industrialism.

Several of these reform movements--such as the 19th-century urban parks movement, without which contemporary big-city life would be almost unlivable--have made permanent contributions to our experience and understanding of good city life. Others have been more problematic.