On his book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present
Cover Interview of January 28, 2020
The wide angle
The book is an interpretative look at the characteristic
patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are
identified with American urbanization. It seeks to foster an understanding of
the cultural processes, entrepreneurial motivations, plans, and particularly
the cultural idealism that has influenced the way Americans have chosen to spread
out over the North American landscape.
A vast literature exists about American urbanization, often developed
from a socio-economic perspective. Fewer studies focus on the instinct to keep
reconsidering forms of human settlement. Much has been written to chronicle a perceived
anti-urban attitude among Americans, identified by a persisting preference (until
recently) among Americans for places away from rather than amidst the buzz of
the city, especially the large city or the metropolis. The title of a recent
book, Americans Against the City, encapsulates this view well.
But what if Americans have instead been intrigued by cities
of their imagination, rather than those at their feet? What if their
ambivalence about those monstrously expanding industrial-era cities led to
reformist ambitions to rethink the traditional city for a new world? What if
the arrival of the modern age, associated with the discovery of the Americas,
necessitated planning towns and cities for a rapidly changing world and to
modernize the old? Such questions were the book’s points of departure.
Historians have chronicled the prevalence of 18th and 19th century
religious and secular utopias. However, the rethinking of forms of community
and settlement patterns was far more extensive and varied. Examples include the
Founders’ search for an egalitarian distribution of land to all citizens; the
reoccurring idealization of the small town, as for example on behalf of early
suburbs claimed to be as hospitable as towns, and then as the means of recovering
from generic suburbia; the optimization of places for labor in company towns often
placed away from town; the Olmstedian return of nature into the heart of the city;
the conquest of the West following a Manifest Destiny ideology; Henry Ford’s
acceleration of an “autopia,” the car claiming to solve the problem of the city
by enabling us to leave it; and other utopian conjectures such as Walt Disney’s
initial EPCOT dream and the 1960s new towns movement.
The book’s genesis is a course that I have taught for over
three decades at Harvard University entitled The Evolution of the American
City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form. Not a historian by training, I come
to the subject of American urbanization as an architect and urban planner, who in
addition to teaching has practiced professionally in multiple American and
international contexts. Characteristic of an architect’s tendency, my
observations are biased by a focus on the built environment, but with a fascination
to unravel underlying ideals that inspired what has been built.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
The book is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified with American urbanization. It seeks to foster an understanding of the cultural processes, entrepreneurial motivations, plans, and particularly the cultural idealism that has influenced the way Americans have chosen to spread out over the North American landscape.
A vast literature exists about American urbanization, often developed from a socio-economic perspective. Fewer studies focus on the instinct to keep reconsidering forms of human settlement. Much has been written to chronicle a perceived anti-urban attitude among Americans, identified by a persisting preference (until recently) among Americans for places away from rather than amidst the buzz of the city, especially the large city or the metropolis. The title of a recent book, Americans Against the City, encapsulates this view well.
But what if Americans have instead been intrigued by cities of their imagination, rather than those at their feet? What if their ambivalence about those monstrously expanding industrial-era cities led to reformist ambitions to rethink the traditional city for a new world? What if the arrival of the modern age, associated with the discovery of the Americas, necessitated planning towns and cities for a rapidly changing world and to modernize the old? Such questions were the book’s points of departure.
Historians have chronicled the prevalence of 18th and 19th century religious and secular utopias. However, the rethinking of forms of community and settlement patterns was far more extensive and varied. Examples include the Founders’ search for an egalitarian distribution of land to all citizens; the reoccurring idealization of the small town, as for example on behalf of early suburbs claimed to be as hospitable as towns, and then as the means of recovering from generic suburbia; the optimization of places for labor in company towns often placed away from town; the Olmstedian return of nature into the heart of the city; the conquest of the West following a Manifest Destiny ideology; Henry Ford’s acceleration of an “autopia,” the car claiming to solve the problem of the city by enabling us to leave it; and other utopian conjectures such as Walt Disney’s initial EPCOT dream and the 1960s new towns movement.
The book’s genesis is a course that I have taught for over three decades at Harvard University entitled The Evolution of the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form. Not a historian by training, I come to the subject of American urbanization as an architect and urban planner, who in addition to teaching has practiced professionally in multiple American and international contexts. Characteristic of an architect’s tendency, my observations are biased by a focus on the built environment, but with a fascination to unravel underlying ideals that inspired what has been built.