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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
A Spiritual City provides a broad examination of the meaning and importance of cities from a Christian perspective. * Contains thought-provoking theological and spiritual reflections on city-making by a leading scholar * Unites contemporary thinking about urban space and built environments with the latest in urban theology * Addresses the long-standing anti-urban bias of Christianity and its emphasis on inwardness and pilgrimage * Presents an important religious perspective on the potential of cities to create a strong human community and sense of sacred space
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Seitenzahl: 417
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for The Spiritual City
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Contemporary Cities
What Counts as Urban?
Public Living
The City as Spiritual Challenge
The Changing Modern City
Cities in the Bible
A Map of the Book
Part One: The City in Christian Thought
Chapter 1: Augustine’s Two Cities
Before Augustine
Augustine’s Human City
Social Virtues: Augustine’s Monastic Vision
Epilogue: Augustine’s Theology of Self
Chapter 2: Monasticism and Utopian Visions
A Movement to the Margins
Utopias
Spaces of Reconciliation
Irish Monasticism
Thomas Merton and Cities
Chapter 3: The City as Sacred
Cathedrals
The City as Sacred
Universities as Sacred Space
The Vita Evangelica
The Beguines
Thomas Aquinas and Civic Life
Conclusion
Chapter 4: The City and the Reformations
A Protestant Ethic of Space?
Sweden – A Lutheran Test Case
John Calvin’s Geneva
Alternative Community: The Shakers
Ignatian Urbanism
Industrial Revolution and Urban Change
Chapter 5: Michel de Certeau
Ignatian Resources
Everyday Subversive Practices
De Certeau, Le Corbusier and the Modern City
Part Two: Theological Reflection and the City
Chapter 6: Place and the Sacred
Place and Social Crisis
Place, Belonging and Commitment
Place and Commitment
Place and Memory
Place and Particularity
The Sacred and Place
The Function of Sacred Space
Is Sacred Space Important?
What Counts as Sacred Space Today?
The City as Sacred Space
Chapter 7: The Art of Community
Urban Theory and Community
Models of Christian Engagement
Theological Themes
God-as-Trinity
Christianity and Community
Regeneration and Redemption
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Reconciliation and Hospitality
The Words We Use
Costly Reconciliation
Excluding Otherness
Fear and Loathing
Spaces
A Christian Response
Catholicity and God
Becoming Catholic People
The Demands of Hospitality
Spirituality of Reconciliation: The Rule of St Benedict
Spirituality of Reconciliation: The Eucharist
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Urban Virtues
Christian Theology and Urban Virtue
Origins
Discernment in Christian Tradition
Ignatian Discernment
Desire, Discernment and Choice
Individual, Personal or Social?
Discernment, The Common Good and Making the Good City
Epilogue
Sacramentality and the City
Eschatology and the City
Conclusion
Select Reading
Index
Eula
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise for The Spiritual City
“Christian understandings of the city have often been negative, but Sheldrake shows that there is a rich tradition of thinking about the city throughout Christian history. This tradition can contribute to the moral and spiritual vision which is essential if cities are to continue to be humanising and hopeful places, spaces of reconciliation rather than alienation. In dialogue with geographers, philosophers as well as social theorists, Sheldrake sets out a rich and complex vision of how Christian thinking can contribute to a worldwide debate.”
Tim Gorringe, University of Exeter
“This is an extraordinarily thoughtful book. In carefully tracing the history of Christian thought on the city, Philip Sheldrake shows how a sense of the sacred can replenish the urban aesthetic and lives led today largely in environments that push belonging, community and fulfilment to the very edge of togetherness. A compelling and beautifully written book.”
Ash Amin, University of Cambridge
“A quite exceptionally original and timely book, which combines deep knowledge of the Christian tradition with sensitivity to the issues of urban life today, and offers fresh insight into what the sacramental community of Christian faith brings to our current anxieties about social cohesion, justice and inclusion.”
Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and now Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
Philip Sheldrake is Senior Research Fellow at Westcott House in the Cambridge Theological Federation, UK and Director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Spirituality, Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio Texas, USA. He has taught and written extensively in the field of Christian spirituality, on the nature of space and place in religion, and on spirituality more generally. He is involved internationally in inter-religious dialogue. His dozen books include Spirituality: A Brief History (Wiley Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2013), Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology and Social Practice (2010), Spirituality and History (2nd edition, 1998) and, as editor, New SCM/Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (2005). He is a Past-President of the international Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality.
The Spiritual City
Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban
Philip Sheldrake
This edition first published 2014© 2014 Philip Sheldrake
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Cover image: Fra Carnevale, The Ideal City, c.1480, oil on panel.© Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library
To Susie
Preface
I have been fascinated for many years by the theme of “place” in relation to human identity. My first real opportunity to give this topic some theological and interdisciplinary reflection came when the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge invited me to give the Hulsean Lectures in the academic year 1999–2000. These were published in 2001 jointly by SCM Press and Johns Hopkins University Press as Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity. The final lecture and chapter, “Re-placing the city,” gathered together a number of my initial thoughts on “place” in reference to our understanding of urban living. I am particularly grateful to Professors David Ford and Denys Turner, who hosted me during the Hulsean Lectures, for encouraging me to develop my thinking on cities into a separate project.
The opportunity to give this idea sustained attention came during 2003–2008 when I held the Leech Professorial Fellowship at Durham University. The Fellowship was supported by the William Leech Foundation set up by the Newcastle philanthropist Sir William Leech. The Fellowship enabled me to concentrate for five years on theological, historical, and urban research in relation to the past, present and potential future of cities. While I have had the opportunity since 2008 to further refine my thinking on cities, and have been invited to speak on the subject in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, the USA, and Canada, this book is essentially the product of my time in Durham. I am very grateful to the Leech Trust for appointing me. Additionally, during the Fellowship I was fortunate to work from time to time with Revd Dr Peter Robinson and his urban theology project in Byker, East Newcastle. I also gave a number of public lectures and other presentations on cities in Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne, two of which were co-presentations with Professor Ash Amin, the founding Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and with Professor Fred Robinson, a colleague as Professorial Fellow of St Chad’s College in the university. In 2007 I was also privileged to co-organize an international colloquium on “Faith and Spirituality in the Post-Secular City” with Professor Amin and Professors Joe Painter and Stephen Graham of the Department of Geography. This was co-hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study and St Chad’s College.
Thanks are also due to Westcott House in the Cambridge Theological Federation, where I am currently Senior Research Fellow. There, I have been able to put the finishing touches to the book and have also been helped by the stimulation of assisting with the Westcott Foundation urban project. I also want to thank my research assistant, August Higgins, at the Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, for help with compiling the index. As always, I dedicate this book to Susie whose thought-provoking questions as well as loving support have been vital throughout and who contributed significantly to the cover design.
Finally, the image on the cover is a painting The Ideal City, attributed to the fifteenth-century Italian artist and Dominican friar Fra Carnevale, now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. The structures and architecture of an imaginary piazza are metaphors for a well-designed and well-governed city. The fountain in the foreground, source of life-giving water, is flanked by four statues on columns portraying the urban virtues of Justice, Moderation, Liberality and Courage.
Philip Sheldrake
Senior Research Fellow
Westcott House, Cambridge Theological Federation
Introduction
The meaning and future of cities is arguably one of the most important and challenging issues of our time. As we shall see, there is a widespread sense that we need some kind of compelling urban vision that moves us beyond the limitations of a purely instrumental or utilitarian response to the issue. By a vision I mean a sense that the human city is, or can be, more than an efficient socioeconomic mechanism or convenient but impersonal administrative system conceived by policy-makers and shaped by detached urban planning. In other words, if we accept the need for vision we inevitably point towards frameworks of values based upon some kind of worldview, an understanding of human existence and a horizon of ultimacy.
This book seeks to be a theological and historical “essay” from a Christian perspective on a variety of approaches to cities. In other words, it is not a comprehensive analysis of either urban theory or of other people’s theological writings. My purpose is to uncover a few of the rich sources of urban thought and practice in Christianity from a range of different contexts. I hope to suggest ways in which, with due respect to the difference between the various historical and cultural contexts, these may contribute fresh perspectives to the wider human community. As we shall see, I view cities essentially in terms of a “public arena,” characterized by the interaction of strangers. Consequently, the central Judeo-Christian virtue of hospitality to strangers – those who are “other” – is a thread throughout the book.
Engaging the riches of urban thought and expression in Christianity with the contemporary problems of cities is an exercise in what has become known as “postsecularism.”1 The concept counters the ideology known as the “secular project” that held sway in Western countries after the Second World War. This sought to promote a belief in the wholly private nature of religion. Such a viewpoint is rendered implausible both by the simple fact that the majority of the world’s population remains religious in some sense and by the recent upsurge in global conflicts with overtly religious dimensions. A critical engagement with religion is now a major global priority. One dominant theme of “postsecularism” is that we must seriously question the argument that any form of shared belief is impossible in plural societies.2 This clearly has application to the search for shared values in contemporary, diverse urban environments.
Contemporary Cities
The current global growth rate of cities is a critical challenge. By “cities” I mean urban environments characterized not simply by substantial size or large population but also by diversity – social, cultural, ethnic, and religious. The world is rapidly becoming urbanized. In 1950, roughly 29 percent of the world’s population lived in urban environments. By 1965 this had risen to 36 percent, by 1990 to 50 percent. This figure is predicted to rise to around 60 percent by 2025, 70 percent by 2050 and at least 75 percent by the end of this century.3 In the first part of the twenty-first century the “big story” is a worldwide migration of people from rural environments to the city. Humanity for the first time faces a mega-urbanized world. This also means that we are dealing increasingly with mega-cities, many of which are in the new economic giants of India, Brazil, and China. For example, Mumbai has a population of some 18 million, São Paulo is 17+ million, and Shanghai is 14+ million. We increasingly confront sprawling and de-centered cities burdened by crime, congestion, pollution, and social divisions. This means, in effect, that the urbanization of the world is often simultaneously “slumization,” to borrow a concept coined by the American philosopher, Eduardo Mendieta. One in six city-dwellers worldwide is currently a slum dweller, and at current rates of increase, by 2050 one in three people – 3 billion – will be.4
Cities have a vital role in shaping the human spirit for good or for ill. They represent and create a climate of values that define how we understand human existence and gather together into communities. Conversely, our understanding of what enhances the human spirit shapes the environments we build. As a consequence, their future is not merely a social or economic matter but is also a profound spiritual challenge. Thus, “To read the cities we have built or imagined is, in the end, to read the spiritual biography of our civilization.”5
This fact was clearly recognized by several late-twentieth-century popes. In the 1971 Apostolic Letter, Octogesima Adveniens, Pope Paul VI directed his remarks at social inequality, particularly in reference to contemporary urbanism and its problems. He was concerned with what he called the “irreversible stage” of urbanization associated with social consequences of industrialization in the developing world, and the millions of poor farmers who fled the land for the big cities in hope of a better life. The task of Christians should be “to create new modes of neighborliness” (paragraphs 8–12). He also referred explicitly to the hidden misery to be found in the city which “fosters discrimination and also indifference,” homelessness, loneliness, and exploitation of various kinds (paragraph 10).
Pope John Paul II in Chapter IV, section 37 of his 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio stated:
Where before there were stable human and social situations, today everything is in flux. One thinks, for example, of urbanization and the massive growth of cities, especially where demographic pressure is greatest. In not a few countries, over half the population already lives in a few “megalopolises,” where human problems are often aggravated by the feeling of anonymity experienced by masses of people.
…. efforts should be concentrated on the big cities, where new customs and styles of living arise together with new forms of culture and communication, which then influence the wider population. It is true that the “option for the neediest” means that we should not overlook the most abandoned and isolated human groups, but it is also true that individual or small groups cannot be evangelized if we neglect the centers where a new humanity, so to speak, is emerging, and where new models of development are taking shape.
In addition, in his 1991 encyclical, Centissimus Annus, marking the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II also underlined the problems of uncontrolled urbanization in the developing world.6
As background to our reflections, a positive challenge is offered by Joel Kotkin’s provocative study, The City: A Global History.7 He suggests that throughout history successful cities have performed three critical functions in varying ways – the provision of security, the hosting of commerce, and the creation of sacred space. Historically, the latter has been expressed by religious buildings, cathedrals, temples, and mosques, which embody a transcendent horizon in and for the city. However, Kotkin suggests that the city itself is, or should be, a sacred place, that authentically offers an inspiring vision of human existence. He recalls that all major religions have produced models of urban meaning. However, he also notes that the sacred role of cities is regularly ignored in contemporary discussions of the urban condition and the future of cities.
When we confront possible urban futures in the twenty-first century, one key question is “what are cities for?” They no longer have strictly practical roles as defense against attack or as the necessary focus for economic systems. If cities are to have meaning rather than merely an irreversible existence, there needs to be greater reflection on their civilizing possibilities. Cities have a capacity to focus a range of physical, intellectual, and creative energies simply because they combine differences of age, ethnicity, culture, gender, and religion in unparalleled ways. As Richard Sennett, the eminent sociologist, reminds us in reference to the writings of Aristotle, this is both opportunity and challenge. It is precisely the combination of different people, rather than of similar people, that brings cities into existence.8 Any attempt to address the conundrum of the city needs more than a mechanical approach. The challenge is how to relate city-making to a vision of the human spirit and what enhances it.
While the “new urbanism” that seeks to respond to current city problems addresses, for example, questions of sustainability, the recovery of a sense of history and the kind of urban design that shapes cohesive neighborhoods, it rarely refers to the need for some kind of moral or spiritual vision with the power to hold cities together.9 A notable exception is the work of the eminent urban planner, Leonie Sandercock, who writes of “the city of spirit” in her book Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century.10 Yet, as Kotkin notes, what is more important than the creation of new buildings or spaces in isolation is the value city-dwellers actually place on their urban experience. In other words, a successful city is, in the end, a state of mind that offers a vision of a human community that is capable of promoting co-existence between strangers and of learning how to seek a shared code of social behavior. Kotkin critiques all religions, including Christianity, for somehow losing touch with their own historic urban visions. As a result, when religion addresses urban questions it too often tends merely to echo the pragmatic urban language of professional or policy groups. At the same time it largely fails to contribute its own distinctive discourse to the contemporary conversations about the future of cities.
It follows from this that a key challenge to religions such as Christianity in today’s radically plural, multicultural, and multireligious Western cities, is to rediscover their own voice – their traditions of urban thinking and practice. This is the building material of ideas, symbols, or experience that is needed to help create a compelling spiritual vision for cities. For, as Kotkin comments starkly at the conclusion of his book, the history of cities teaches us that without some kind of “widely shared belief system it would be exceedingly difficult to envision a viable urban future.”11
In this context, the phrase “the good city” recently seems to have become common currency. For example, the urban thinker Ash Amin addresses the theme from the perspective of human geography.12 For Amin the key is to develop the habit of solidarity among strangers built upon a commitment to the common good. Solidarity is shaped by four everyday basics of urban living: repair, relatedness, rights, and re-enchantment. “Repair” refers to the proper maintenance of technological and mechanical infrastructures. The point is that such infrastructures are never purely a matter of mechanics. They are the life-support system of a city that enables effective human orientation and movement. “Relatedness” seeks to counter various forms of human marginalization, exclusion, and disconnection. This may involve a universal provision of the basics of healthy human existence, the creation of social or cultural projects that bring together people of different backgrounds or creatively returning public spaces to effective mixed use. “Rights” again addresses the problem of the effective exclusion and restriction of certain groups in favor of the safety or dominance of others. This needs to be countered by a concept in public culture and civic politics of “the open city” where new voices can emerge and marginalized groups may stake their claim to participate. Finally, “re-enchantment” seeks to make public space more than a context for human socialization created purely by consumerism or tourism. Rather, we should work imaginatively and experimentally with public space to make it the medium for a transformation of imagination and behavior through protest gatherings (nonlegislative “politics”), art, education, and entertainment.
The question “what makes a good city?” also animated the 2006 Church of England Commission on Urban Life and Faith and its report Faithful Cities.13 Among the words and phrases used in response to the question were that a good city is “active,” “diverse,” “inclusive,” “safe,” “well-led,” “environmentally sensitive,” has an “active civil society,” “values the inhabitants,” offers “opportunities for all,” “attracts wealth creators,” but also “shares its wealth,” is “big enough to be viable” but also is “small enough to be on a human scale.” In a sentence, the “good city” enables human aspirations to be enhanced, to be productive, and to be inclusive, rather than for them to be repressed or selfish. Fundamentally, the report Faithful Cities suggests that the “good city” is person-centered rather than shaped by abstract approaches to politics, planning, and structural efficiency.
By contrast, the monumental modernist architecture that still characterizes many of today's Western cities does not stand for the value of individual people, for intimate relationships, or for focused community. Rather, it speaks the language of size, money, and power. Commercial complexes such as Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands stand in brooding isolation rather than in relationship to anywhere else. Modern cities built in the last 60 years frequently lack proper centers that express the whole life of a multifaceted community. Even the centers of older European cities reconstructed after the devastation of the Second World War can often be described as soulless.
A major part of the problem was the dominance of “zoning” or a cellular view of urban planning (originating in part from the iconic Swiss-born French architect Charles Jeanneret, otherwise known as Le Corbusier) which divided cities into “special areas” or zones for living, working, leisure, and shopping. The immediate consequence of this “zoning” was a fragmentation of human living and of a coherent sense of community diversity. On top of this, the creation of a “city of special areas” has the effect of emptying parts of it at night, especially the centers and commercial districts. This tends to make them dead and sometimes dangerous. Finally, a cellular design demands the separation of areas by distance and clear boundaries. This substantially increases the need for travel and consequently increases pollution.
In more general terms, this differentiation into discrete areas may be said to reflect a growing desacralization of Western culture. There is no longer a centered, let alone spiritually centered, meaning for the city. It is now a commodity, fragmented into multiple activities, multiple ways of organizing time and space, matched by multiple roles for the inhabitants.14 Overall, zoning or cellular urban design does not invite people out into shared, humane places of encounter. New domestic ghettos are increasingly protected against sterile public spaces that are no longer respected but, at best, treated unimaginatively and, at worst, abandoned to violence and vandalism.
Cities reflect and affect the quality of human relationships. The fact is that in the context of urban environments we cannot separate functional, ethical, and spiritual questions. If places are to be sacred, they must affirm the sacredness of people, community, and a human capacity for transcendence. In an earlier age in European cities the cathedral was an icon of such an urban vision. It offered at the same time an image of God and a symbol of the ideals of the citizens at the heart of the city.
What Counts as Urban?
When we think of what is meant by a city or, more broadly, the urban, we nowadays tend to concentrate on questions of density and size whereas, for example, in England until relatively recently a major criterion for being a city was the presence of a historic cathedral. However, as the seventh-century Christian thinker St Isidore of Seville reminds us, in thinking about what we mean by the urban we need to balance two Latin concepts: urbs (cities of stone) and civitas (cities of people). Our sense of place refers both to the built environment and the state of mind (or soul) shaped by this, or by geography. The point is that Isidore’s use of urbs and civitas does not refer to alternative concepts of “the city” or two separate planes without interaction. For Isidore, there could be no absolute separation between physical design and urban community. Such a split would have mutilated a reality in which these two dimensions are naturally co-dependent and fused. Yet, according to his philosophy, in the end what makes a place a city is the people, not the architecture in isolation. “A city [civitas] is a number of men [sic] joined by a social bond. It takes its name from the citizens [cives] who dwell in it. As an urbs it is only a walled structure, but inhabitants, not building stones, are referred to as a city.”15 Nevertheless, we need to give attention to urbs – to the powerful impact on people and human community of design, architecture, and the planning of physical spaces.
In the Western world, from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle onwards, cities have always been powerful symbols of how we understand and construct human community. In particular, cities are paradigms of our outer, public life. Unfortunately, since the nineteenth century Western culture, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, has become deeply polarized. The private sphere (inwardness, family and friends, home) has been idealized as the backstage where individuals are truly themselves, relaxing unobserved before playing different roles on the public stage.16 However, from a Christian perspective is public living simply a role to be taken up and put down at will? A recent Archbishop of Canterbury, the British theologian Rowan Williams, notes that “we are systematically misled, even corrupted, by a picture of the human agent as divided into an outside and an inside – a ‘true self’, hidden, buried, to be excavated by one or another kind of therapy.”17 Rather, our identity comes into being from the start through human communication and interaction. An unbalanced rhetoric of interiority has had serious moral consequences because it suggests that our social or public life is of secondary importance. However, Christian theology, following St Augustine, affirms that there is no absolutely private identity. To be human embodies a common life and a common task. Without developing a complex point further at this point, it is important to note the intimate link between human identity and the Christian relational theology of God as “Trinity.” The core of the Christian life – a paradigm of redeemed human existence overall – is to become united with God, in Jesus Christ, through a Spirit-led communion with one another. God’s own relational nature is fundamental to such a life. The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that God is persons-in-communion, a mutuality of self-giving love. From this perspective, communion underpins all existence.18
Public Living
If to be truly human is to be “in public,” in practical terms what does “public” imply? Some social commentators such as José Casanova limit public life to “the arena of moral and political contestation.”19 However, the sociologist Lyn Lofland, who is concerned with a growing American anti-urban, anti-public rhetoric which fosters intolerance and prejudice, uses the word “public” more broadly for places that are dominated by the interaction of strangers or those who are only known casually, for example the newspaper vendor. For her, the city is a powerful paradigm of public existence. Public places are very different from the intimate familiar places of the private or parochial worlds.20 It is interesting that the Christian tradition suggests that God is often most powerfully experienced in places that are “strange” to us, rather than safely protected. There, people who appear alien challenge our sense of familiarity and security. Scholars sensitive to issues of place-identity in the New Testament, especially in the Synoptic Gospels, have noted that Jesus regularly pushed those closest to him away from familiar places and people towards places that were initially threatening because the people in such places were marginal, Gentiles or in some way “other.”21
Public life, city life, is the arena where diverse people attempt to establish some form of commonality. This includes the relatively anonymous sociability of local neighborhoods and less anonymous (yet not necessarily intimate) contexts such as the local church. In other words, living publicly goes beyond an incidental sharing of space with others where the individual self is still primary and demands protection. To live publicly implies learning how to be truly hospitable to what is different, unfamiliar, distasteful or even feared. Indeed, to live publicly means letting go of a life focused on the survival of my autonomous self. It involves engaging “the other” in ways that embrace diversity as part of the process of establishing and reinforcing a sense of “who I am.” Living publicly implies real encounters with what is different and unfamiliar yet somehow establishing a common life. Social interaction and active citizenship may thus be seen as forms of spiritual practice.
The City as Spiritual Challenge
This central aspect of diversity and difference in cities is picked up by Richard Sennett in his criticism of Christianity’s supposed rejection of public life and cities because of its fear of mixture and self-exposure and its concern for purity.22 In a rich and complex study on the social life of cities, Sennett blames, in part, aspects of Christian theology for the contemporary privatization of space and the soulless nature of modern Western cities. This process began several hundred years ago but reached a particularly powerful climax in the period of urban restoration after the Second World War. Essentially, Sennett argues that modern Western culture suffers from a divide between interiority and exteriority: “It is a divide between subjective experience and worldly experience, self and city.”23 This divide, according to Sennett, is based on an unacknowledged fear of self-exposure. Exposure has the connotation of a threat rather than of the enhancement of life. The result is that, apart from spaces for the celebration of heritage or for consumer needs, city design has concentrated on creating safe divisions between different groups of people. Public space thus becomes bland, as the main purpose is to facilitate movement across it rather than encounters within it.24 According to Sennett, for the city to recover, we need to reaffirm the inherent value of the outer embodied life.
I agree with much that Sennett says. However, I also believe that he misinterprets Christianity as unequivocally a religion of pilgrimage and dislocation rather than of placement. For Sennett, St Augustine’s City of God is the classic expression of the triumph of an inner “city” restlessly in search of eternal fulfillment over the everyday human city.25 Human social places are to be viewed with suspicion. What is most obviously characteristic of these outer places is difference and diversity. Sennett argues, therefore, that by denying the true value of the outside, theology has underpinned the way that Western culture doubts the spiritual value of diversity. If the deep valuation of our inner life found expression externally, it was in church buildings or in cathedrals. For Sennett, these places actually undermined any meaningful definition for the city in itself.26 He equates “the sacred” with sanctuary, which implies not merely special places but an image of protection and refuge from a wider world. According to Sennett, in the premodern city, churches were “sanctuaries” in both senses, and so promoted withdrawal from the outer life. I shall explore a rather different interpretation of the historic role of cathedrals and other urban religious buildings in Chapter 3.
Sennett further suggests that modern urbanism, with its sterile public spaces, stems from what he calls “a Protestant ethic of space.” This, he posits, is a further post-Reformation refinement of the Augustinian distinction. According to Sennett, the coming of Protestantism had a long-term impact on what he terms “the compulsive neutralizing of the environment,” for example, the way modernist planners designed the “neutral city.” This reflected a puritanical suspicion of pleasure and color. “The sacred” should be sober not carnival. As I shall suggest in the next chapter and in Chapter 4, this reading of St Augustine and of subsequent Christian thought, while not wholly inaccurate, is too one-sided. That said, the French Jesuit social scientist and scholar of Christian spirituality, Michel de Certeau, in his writings on spatial practices, also refers to and severely criticizes the impact of a fear of mixing and of the disintegration of social boundaries on modernist urban design (for example in the work of Le Corbusier) that motivated its pursuit of spatial purification. This will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5.27
We might also note the degree of ambivalence towards the twentieth-century mega-city present in an urban writer such as Lewis Mumford, where what he calls Megalopolis, the great multimillion city, is simply a staging post on the road to Necropolis, the city of the dead. However such views are not explicitly related to the Christian tradition.28
In Western countries over the last sixty years or so, cities have all too often undermined place identity in pursuit of values driven largely by economic considerations. The French anthropologist, Marc Augé, a student of the Jesuit Michel de Certeau, distinguishes between “place,” engaged with our identity, full of historical monuments and creative of social life, and what he calls “non-place” – in his words, “curious places which are both everywhere and nowhere.” There, no organic social life is possible. By “non-place” he means such contexts as supermarkets, airports, hotels, freeways, working at a computer, or sitting in front of a television. These bring about a fragmentation of awareness and incoherence in relation to “the world.”29 Augé points to urban centers as indicative of the importance of “place.” Classic centers contain buildings that resonate with authority and symbolic meaning whether religious (for example a cathedral), civic (the town hall) or historical (for example a war memorial). However, the key feature of such centers is that they are humanly active and hospitable places. People gather and interact there. Significant numbers of cafés, hotels, or businesses concentrate nearby and cross-town routes pass through them. True centers offer “places for living” by being places of encounter,
…where individual itineraries can intersect and mingle, where a few words are exchanged and solitudes momentarily forgotten, on the church steps, in front of the town hall, at the café counter or in the baker’s doorway.30
Cities enable or disable place identity. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6, a sense of place is a category of human experience with a strong impact on how we see the world and situate ourselves within it.31 However “place” is no longer the simple concept that post-Enlightenment thought once proposed. Contemporary urban theorists note that in today’s cities, place identity is less fixed and local than hitherto. Community is understood as a never-completed process of becoming, and city life is caught up in a continuous flow.32 Technology and rapid travel have increased global connections. Cultures previously viewed as homogeneous are revealed as plural and bound up with power issues. In short, “place identity” nowadays embraces a range of associations from the local home or neighborhood to a sense of a single global community. In a world of multifaceted place identity, city-making increasingly needs to attend both to what I call “micro-place” (satisfactory homes and effective neighborhoods) and to “macro-place” (meaningful expressions of wider connections).
Our environments are active partners in the conversation between location and the geographies of the mind and spirit that create “place.” Place involves human narrative and memory embedded in place, including deeper narrative currents that absorb the stories of all who have lived there previously. It is, therefore, appropriate to think of places as texts, layered with meaning. A hermeneutics of place continually reveals new interpretations in the interplay between physical environment, memory, and specific people at a particular moment.
Precisely because “place” involves narrative, it is not surprising that it is often contested. We only have to think of Jerusalem, claimed by Israelis and Palestinians and sacred to three faiths. In deconstructing modernity’s belief in objective, absolute place, postmodern critiques assert that definition is power. This is also true of cities, their design and their regeneration processes. The French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of place also reminds us that systems of spatialization are historically conditioned – not merely physical arrangements of things but also patterns of social action and routine, as well as historical conceptions of the world. The meta-narratives of the people who hold power take over the public places they control. However altruistic or benign the agendas of those with power appear to be, the history of these places sadly often becomes a story of dominance and repression. The notion that place relates to issues of empowerment and disempowerment forces us to think of multilocalities (locations are different “places” simultaneously) and multivocalities (different voices are heard in each place).33
If cities are to be places that reinforce a sense that human life is sacred rather than solely a biological phenomenon, they must embrace all dimensions of human existence – functional, ethical, and spiritual. First, we need somewhere to pass effectively through the stages of life and reach our full potential. Second, we need places where we belong to a community. Third, we need cities that continue to facilitate a fruitful relationship with the natural environment. Finally, we need human contexts that offer access to the sacred (however we understand it) – or, better, relate us to life itself as sacred.34
The Changing Modern City
Cities have always produced a unique vibrancy. They not only have a particular capacity to create diverse community but, historically, they have been the primary sites of human innovation and creativity. On the whole, as Sir Peter Hall reminds us in his monumental Cities in Civilization, the history of Western civilization is largely the history of cities. Indeed, the very words “civilization” and “civilized” derive from Latin words for “city” (civitas) and citizen (cives). As Hall argues, in many respects it is precisely the complexity and diversity of cities that forces innovation upon us as the means of solving problems that the very size of cities creates.
Yet, our attempts to reflect on the meaning and future of cities today must take on board a number of radical changes in the nature of cities that go back to the industrial revolution but have accelerated since the end of the Second World War. We not only have to cope with a much higher and growing proportion of the world’s population that is urbanized but with a number of important corollaries: the sheer size and rate of expansion of modern cities; the increased mobility and flow of life within them that calls into question any simple notion of place identity; the increasing plurality of communities to which people belong; the global reach of any large city; the radical diversity and pluralism of people and cultures within cities.
This all runs counter to a tendency by some thinkers to link place identity (undoubtedly a vital human need) exclusively to “the local” and to idealize some kind of domestic vision as the primary symbol of a satisfactory life. Even one of the gurus of modern urban theory, Manuel Castells, who previously preached the inevitable triumph of the mega-city over small-scale development, has surprisingly returned to the concept of family and home as the only effective providers of human flourishing “in a world characterized by individuation of work, destruction of civil society and the delegitimization of the state.”35
The problem with an unbalanced emphasis on the local is that we are left only with lament and nostalgia for something that cannot readily be recaptured and with nothing positive to say about other contemporary urban realities such as flow, the transgression of fixed boundaries, and the presence of distant connections, for example among immigrant communities. However, we need a balanced approach. The geographer Anne Buttimer deplores an overemphasis on mobility in the decades since the Second World War which, for her, is a key element in the contemporary Western disintegration of place-identity. We have de-emphasized place for the sake of economic values such as mobility, centralization, or rationalization. The global relativity of space dissolves the reality of place.
The skyscrapers, airports, freeways and other stereotypical components of modern landscapes – are they not the sacred symbols of a civilization that has deified reach and derided home?36
Similar sentiments are expressed by the Scottish Christian ethicist Michael Northcott: “The modern city celebrates and facilitates mobility at the expense of settlement, movement at the expense of place.”37 This is not simply a social issue but a spiritual and theological one. Without a sense of place there is no centering of the human spirit. When human conditions undermine this, the consequent displacement is striking in its effects on individuals and societies. In hardly more than a century, we have moved from a premodern, predominantly rural society through an industrial revolution and urbanized society into what many people call a postmodern, postindustrial world. In an increasingly placeless culture we have become “standardized, removable, replaceable, easily transported and transferred from one location to another.”38 If there is a sense of place, it is predominantly a private one in the face of cynicism about the outer, public world.
Yet, for many people the city is a symbol of social and economic opportunity. It is a symbol of how our origins, caste or class can evaporate. In the city I can become anything I choose to make myself. Equally, what might be called “city experience” dominates the culture and thinking of governments, commerce and the media. This dominant culture insures that groups who do not qualify as urban do not merit the best services – transport, schools, stores, banking, or a post office – because they are not deemed viable.
Cities in the Bible
For better or worse, Western thinking about cities has been deeply influenced over the last thousand years by Christian ideas. As we saw in the case of Richard Sennett, Christianity has sometimes been accused of anti-urban bias. The foundations of Christian response to and thought about cities lie in the Bible. So, briefly, I want to offer a summary overview of the ways that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures have reflected on how cities originated and were constructed. It is important to begin with the Hebrew scriptures as these are also foundational to Christian thought and sensibilities.
Certainly the Hebrew scriptures (or Old Testament) appear to get off to a tricky start. The Book of Genesis can come across as somewhat gloomy about cities. Arguably, this ambivalence is rooted deeply in the Hebrew memory of being originally (and, according to one viewpoint, ideally) a nomadic people. Cain, symbol of human pride and violence, is portrayed as the founder of Enoch, the first city, an alternative to God’s Eden (Genesis 4:16–17). Later the people of Babel in building their tower overreach themselves and seek to replace the authority of God (Genesis 11:1–9). Despite the intercession of Abraham, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed and become classic symbols of corruption. In the Book of Exodus, the wandering Hebrews are portrayed as once again ambivalent about cities: “the city” is the enemy – pagan and also immoral. Cities are abominations that stand against the moral norms of the Covenant between God and Israel (Judges 19:22–30). Such texts are cited by the French sociologist and Protestant thinker, Jacques Ellul, to suggest that the Bible offers no law for the city because the city, far from being sacred, embodies humanity organized against God. For Ellul, “the city” implies a refusal of God’s gift of Eden. Thus, in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures “God has cursed, has condemned the city instead of giving us a law for it.”39 While Ellul goes on to express a somewhat more dialectical understanding of the city (he writes of Nineveh saved by Jonah’s preaching and God’s promise to David in relation to Jerusalem), he does not entirely escape from his anti-urban sentiments.
However, this is a one-sided selection of biblical texts and, indeed, ignores a certain ambiguity even in the texts that Ellul cites. For example, in the story of Babel the city and its tower are also marvels of human creativity and organization. The city is a protection for the people and also ensures some cohesion. The tower is intended as the medium of access to the divine. The very name of the city is actually ambiguous: it is arguably related to “Babylon,” in which context it reflects an ancient Akkadian word for “the gate of God,” whereas in Hebrew the name is associated with “confusion” or “babbling.” The overall implication is that a city may be a preeminent example of human social organization but it is also a potentially unstable association of heterogeneous, rather than homogeneous, people, who may be tempted to go their own way.
There are other positive biblical images of the city in the Hebrew scriptures. Once settled in the Promised Land of Israel, the Jews proclaim Jerusalem as the place of God, a city of peace. Even under the monarchy, Jerusalem is fundamentally ruled by priests and scribes who are the guardians of the divine Covenant. Temple worship shapes cultural life. The Davidic tradition in the Hebrew scriptures was grounded in this settled experience of Jerusalem. At its heart was an assurance that the throne of David would never fail. There was a tendency by royal theologians to link the cultic center of divine power to the throne of the king. That is, political stability became connected with an assurance of God’s ritual presence at the heart of the city. The city of Jerusalem becomes the center to which all memory and meaning are bound.
