On his book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present
Cover Interview of January 28, 2020
Lastly
My hope is that readers come away with two primary insights
about the evolution of American city building. First, that Americans have
rarely felt bound by traditional ideas about what constitutes a city. Instead,
they have instinctively relied on an ancient notion—the city being a place inhabited
by citizens, from the Latin civis, for citizen, and civitas, for
the social body of citizens. This more general construct has produced some unprecedented
environments, such as suburban spread that rankle those who define a city in a
particular way, and has led to exaggerated accusations of cultural
anti-urbanism.
Secondly, an inherent American idealism and optimism about a
better future, has played an important and near continuous role in the creation
of the metropolitan American landscape. The idealism may at times have been misguided
or unwarranted, but instrumental nonetheless. It arrived with the arrivals from
the old world, was fortified in concert with a body of ideals that became
fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and intensified during the explosion
of urban growth arriving with the Industrial Revolution.
The cities in America just taking shape, rather than old European
cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural,
political, and technological transformations of the seventeenth through the
twentieth centuries, heralded the arrival of the modern age. And even during
eras of ambivalence about the large city, such as during the massive
suburbanization at mid-20th century, optimism about future possibilities still
characterized innovations in the built environment.
At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st-century America is
home to fewer optimists, much less utopians. That inherent idealism—embodied in
the Constitution with the phrase “to form a more perfect Union”—is seemingly
in remission. Concerns about growing social and economic inequalities;
political partisanship and resulting inaction; climate change accelerating environmental
harm; and even about diminished standing around the word, are subjects of near-daily
conversations from living rooms to classrooms to board rooms.
Given its long gestation in a classroom, the book was not undertaken
as a call for our old aspirational angels to spring forth again. However, as the
chapters introduce each pursuit at constructing more perfect unions, at least
in the shaping of towns and cities, readers may conclude that a return of
American idealism may be useful in mitigating present anxieties. As we
increasingly become, worldwide, an urban species, additional imagination with which
to manage our expanding urban footprints will be necessary.
[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
Lastly
My hope is that readers come away with two primary insights about the evolution of American city building. First, that Americans have rarely felt bound by traditional ideas about what constitutes a city. Instead, they have instinctively relied on an ancient notion—the city being a place inhabited by citizens, from the Latin civis, for citizen, and civitas, for the social body of citizens. This more general construct has produced some unprecedented environments, such as suburban spread that rankle those who define a city in a particular way, and has led to exaggerated accusations of cultural anti-urbanism.
Secondly, an inherent American idealism and optimism about a better future, has played an important and near continuous role in the creation of the metropolitan American landscape. The idealism may at times have been misguided or unwarranted, but instrumental nonetheless. It arrived with the arrivals from the old world, was fortified in concert with a body of ideals that became fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and intensified during the explosion of urban growth arriving with the Industrial Revolution.
The cities in America just taking shape, rather than old European cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural, political, and technological transformations of the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, heralded the arrival of the modern age. And even during eras of ambivalence about the large city, such as during the massive suburbanization at mid-20th century, optimism about future possibilities still characterized innovations in the built environment.
At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st-century America is home to fewer optimists, much less utopians. That inherent idealism—embodied in the Constitution with the phrase “to form a more perfect Union”—is seemingly in remission. Concerns about growing social and economic inequalities; political partisanship and resulting inaction; climate change accelerating environmental harm; and even about diminished standing around the word, are subjects of near-daily conversations from living rooms to classrooms to board rooms.
Given its long gestation in a classroom, the book was not undertaken as a call for our old aspirational angels to spring forth again. However, as the chapters introduce each pursuit at constructing more perfect unions, at least in the shaping of towns and cities, readers may conclude that a return of American idealism may be useful in mitigating present anxieties. As we increasingly become, worldwide, an urban species, additional imagination with which to manage our expanding urban footprints will be necessary.