City on a Hill

A recurring theme in the history of the United States, beginning with the settlements of Europe's religious dissenters, has been a compulsion to start over. Whether this manifests itself in antipreservationist sentiments in older cities or in the postwar romanticization of suburban sprawl, Americans have long displayed a distinct optimism about newness and growth. In City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present, Alex Krieger, an urban design professor at Harvard and a practicing urban planner, makes this spirit—indeed, a utopian sentiment, he believes—the unifying thread for a new account of urbanism in America. Even as the frontier has closed and Americans have little choice but to improve the cities they have, Krieger argues, we must see the trajectory of the American landscape in terms of the “fundamental idealism” (356) by which planners, architects, presidents, and pundits have constantly yearned to begin anew.The scope of Krieger's project is formidable, not least because his subtitle points to the historical reach of his ambition. Add to it that Krieger really means to account not only for America's cities but for its vision for the country's rural and suburban fabric as well. As he underscores in his introduction, America's urban idealism contrasts to what John-Paul Sartre described as the stifling, changeless cities of Europe: the New World is restless and experimental, none of which would be possible without a canvas of soil with which to imagine new varieties of community. Americans often idealize the urban through its inverse, the vast expanse of a continent, on which trends of growth, demise, decentralization, sprawl, and digitization are sometimes pulling in different directions simultaneously. Krieger's answer to this problem is to twist chronology through nineteen richly illustrated chapters, collectively encyclopedic, that consistently ask how optimism and ambition lay at the heart of Americans’ endeavors. While his tone is critical, it's also appreciative: the cities built of bygone dreams and failed ideals may not have been elysian, but Krieger's hope is to “rekindle the dream” (353) and refocus the energy to new purposes.Since by the end Krieger has made clear his embrace of the utopian imagination, he appropriately begins by exploring the sources and motivations of America's fixation on “reinvention.” Despite the elegance of the subtitle, he declares his intention to scramble a simple chronology. The first figure we meet in chapter 1 is Thomas Jefferson, whose vision for the republic implanted traditions of town grid, gardens, and the “middle landscape” set between unruly nature and urbane civilization. The genius of Jefferson's University of Virginia and home at Monticello remain edifying, but here already Krieger signals his intention to critique, noting how the built environment with a view toward natural paradise creates a template for suburbs and the constant desire to escape society by spreading to the new and better place. The first chapters that follow tend to hold cities at arm's length, instead emphasizing the opposite: the vast unsettled land that inspired Jefferson's agrarianism and the ideal of the citizen's autonomy and freedom. Drawing powerfully on the paintings of Thomas Cole and the ideas of the Transcendentalists, Krieger's account of American anti-urbanism finally settles (no pun intended) into urban history in chapter 4, which takes on the small town ideal and “sentimental utopianism” of the New Urbanists.This quick jump to the modern age, echoed in the next chapters, such as chapter 5's account of the “company town” from the Lowell Mill to Amazon's Seattle offices, emphasizes that as Krieger unfolds his account of American development, the animating approach is to understand the contemporary landscape through the study of historical origins. Not only is he a practicing urban planner and author of city design guides, but this dynamic, thematic approach matches the publicly available syllabus for the course he has taught for decades at Harvard, currently titled Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form. That explains why individual chapters sometimes sit oddly next to one another—such as when the reader turns from a study of the rise of the contemporary suburb, in chapter 6, to a compelling account of the Oklahoma land rush, nineteenth-century homesteading, and federal land grants in chapter 7. The pedagogical impulse beneath the book also benefits the reader in multiple ways, first by leaving us with nonlinear text into which one can dive opportunistically and then by rendering the chapter narratives into eminently well-rehearsed and clear prose.Distilled, the varied chapters of this attractive volume take one of two types. The first is to introduce the central topics surrounding urban planning, including chapters on parks, automobiles, suburbs, and urban renewal. Krieger is at his most engaging when he links the intellectual milieu to developments at the city level, such as in chapter 8, “Making Nature Urbane,” where Frederick Law Olmstead's ideas touch down in Buffalo, Boston, and Kansas City. In such material, it's a simple matter for Krieger to note the resonances between the evolving urban forms and the lasting influence of Jefferson's middle landscape, “geographically positioned between nature and civilization” (19). Also belonging among the chapters of this type are Krieger's consideration of the most self-conscious utopianism in the American tradition, making use of a long tradition of extended studies.1 Chapter 9, for example, links the literary utopias of Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells to the City Beautiful movement and the reform efforts of Jane Addams. Chapter 13 likewise embraces connections between the “communitarian journeys” of the Mormons and Owenites and the starry-eyed youth in 1960s communes, the twentieth-century successors of this tradition. In such chapters, Krieger never wants to let too much distance open up between avowed utopians and those who are engaging in direct, social action out of high-minded ideals.The second dominant approach among the volume's chapters is to trace the planning problems and continuing struggles of notable American cities. Chicago, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Walt Disney's EPCOT Center headline five chapters, while the author's own Boston receives several focused discussions. The inclusion of EPCOT here is no mistake; Krieger persuasively links Disney's original plan for a pollution-free pedestrian community—no mere amusement park—to the New Town movement. The greater surprise is how well Krieger's accounts, compiled from secondary sources and painted in broad strokes that will be familiar to many readers, hang together on the hook of urban idealism. Connections between, say, the blueprint capital of Washington, D.C., and the sprawling fantasyland that is Las Vegas might not be obvious at first; but with Krieger's narration, their origin stories and superficial differences fade to the background. Instead, the common struggle for success and sustainability comes to the fore, each as an expression of “utopian inclinations,” what Krieger identifies as the yearning “to start fresh, yet again, to overcome or ignore limits, to idolize the new, to disperse innocently if recklessly across the land, [and] to depend on technology to overcome environmental shortcomings” (319).In these sinews lie the limits and success of Krieger's approach. For students of utopianism, Krieger elides many people and movements that might otherwise belong under the distinctive banners of optimism, ambition, idealism, and utopianism. Declining a definition that would tie his hands, Krieger begins with only a nod to “the strong disposition Americans have to think differently about places to live,” aiming at “imaginative horizons across the country's history” (xiii). His interpretative account of American urban life unifies so much of the cities we see as artifacts and expressions of past idealism. This is a framework not designed to narrow or focus his scope; but he does use utopia as a muse, finding opportunities to explicate its meaning in more poetic moments, such as when he likens the utopianism of New Orleans to “those existential attributes assigned by Camus to Sisyphus: a sense of purpose found in devotion to a place, dedication to the arduous task of perseverance, and happiness, or at least contentment, attained as a consequence of that perseverance” (330). Though the meaning of utopias in the built environment has received theoretical attention, Krieger leaves the work of locating utopia “to philosophers” (xiii).2Rather, Krieger seeks to expose the utopianism of city planning to a wider readership, and judging by where this book has received initial attention, he is reaching an audience that spans practitioners and the interested public. The focus on utopianism functions as his way of calling into question a set of aspirations and cultural touchstones that we often don't want to examine. Citing with approval Oscar Wilde's dicta that “progress is the realization of utopias” (356), Krieger's tonic for the American city is the call to confront the utopian imagination that continues to pull citizens and cities in the wrong directions: to the sanitization of cities, out to sprawling suburbs, away from environmental stewardship, to new heights of inequality, and away from the common good. His critical stance unfolds most powerfully in the last chapters. In his exploration of New Orleans in chapter 17, for example, Krieger seems to appreciate the city's “quixotic” attachment to place but challenges urban planners to radically redefine “resilience” in the face of existential climate threats. (Spoiler: building better levees won't be enough.) In the Big Easy, utopianism appears at its most naive, now as a palpably irrational impulse to push “hazardous forces of nature aside and [hope] they won't return with a vengeance” (333). Note who bears the consequences for planning failures: Krieger rightly links this vanity to the racial and economic injustice that plagues the city's residents and which Hurricane Katrina only exposed most abjectly. A practitioner reading City on a Hill from beginning to end should find mounting evidence—such as in the “industrial utopia” of Pullman, Illinois (chapter 5) and the construction of federal highways (chapter 14)—of the double-edged sword that utopian thinking always wields. The pursuit of a middle landscape and an escape to nature, true to Jefferson's complicated legacy, has only ever been possible for some citizens. We cannot dodge that “in trying to civilize, sanitize, and increase the appeal of the city,” city planners and theorists “ignore or displace those for whom the city is most essential” (65). Having made explicit the oft-exclusionary nature of America's urban fixations when he discusses affordable housing and “slum” clearances in the twentieth century, by his postscript Krieger is ready to quote Langston Hughes in calling for Americans to remake America.One suspects that there were yet other opportunities to observe the impact of race in America's pursuit of urban ideals, and Krieger's final accounting for the environmental impact of America's “dream of a nature's nation” (353) similarly is sharpest at the last. When, in chapter 6, he identifies the “environmental critique” of suburbia as the most compelling reason to question sprawl, he balances that value with the affordability that has made it into “a paradise for more than a few” (131). Perhaps the slow unfolding of what he believes reflects, too, the book's origins: lest Krieger risk losing his students early in the semester, decades of Harvard students would hear him fault the waste, consumption, and excesses of (their) American homes only on the last day. Even then, he comforts those who are inclined to ambition with a salve, that rejecting “unworthy utopias” does not mean abandoning the “fundamental idealism” that has drawn people to the United States for centuries (356). Instead, Krieger offers the opportunity to “refocus” now that there is no longer an opportunity to escape to an unpopulated frontier or a land of seemingly inexhaustible resources. His final call, then, is for a utopian predisposition to be resolved “to stay, and improve.”That slow reveal and softened blow befits a narrative so sweeping. With so many histories—of ideas, movements, cities, and social forces—at play, it would be too much for one accessible, formidable, and gratifying volume for Krieger to dismiss it all brusquely. Having stitched together history, theory, and practice with an erudition that allows him to quote Thomas Paine as easily as he invokes Jane Jacobs, Krieger has produced a volume that should be essential reading for any student or practitioner of urban planning. What's more, by holding up a mirror to the utopian imagination at the heart of the American project, City on a Hill will long speak to citizens, too

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Epistemology · Frontier · Idealism · Media studies · Planner · Political science · Sociology · Urbanism · History · Law · Philosophy · University Challenges and Reforms · Architecture

• Small-Town Life and Difference

  Elly Long•American Political Thought•2023

  Add to list