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"The more architects and planners have turned their attention to building up the City of Man apart from some vision of the City of God, the meaner and uglier the City of Man has become.
—Philip Bess (1985)
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"But we are now being reminded that the church people go to has an immensely powerful psychological effect on their vision of the Church they are meant to be. The church building is a prime aid, or a prime hindrance, to the building up of the Body of Christ. And what the building says so often shouts something entirely contrary to all that we are seeking to express through the liturgy. And the building will always win—unless and until we can make it say something else."
—Bishop John A. T. Robinson (1962)
I live in a place called middleurbia. Middleurbia is ten miles north of urban Austin, ten miles south of suburban Austin. My middleurban neighborhood is a mix of young, hip professionals and octogenarians who settled the once-dairy farm back in the 1950s. Pecan groves shade our homes. A public park and a swimming pool hold us together in the center.
Two miles to the northwest, plans are being laid for a Wal-Mart Supercenter, a hulking 192,000-square-foot mothership. Two miles to the northeast, the city is installing a shiny new train station and surrounding it with apartments, commercial stores, and a spot of green. I can walk 12 minutes south to a coffee shop, three minutes west to a small Baptist church, 17 minutes north to a mini-mart, barber shop, deli, and acting studio. This is my middleurbian neighborhood.
And the temptation is to think that it's "just" my neighborhood, "coincidentally" set in the city of Austin. But Philip Bess rebukes my wrong thinking, suggesting not only that God cares deeply about cities but also that he has a few good ideas about what it would take to build a good one and to live in it well.
In Till We Have Built Jerusalem, Bess presents a four-part case for good urbanism or, as I might call it, a good experience of a good city. The four parts can be summarized as cities and human flourishing; cities and the sacred; cities and New Urbanism; and finally critical essays on the topic. While lacking a single-threaded argument, the book nevertheless holds together thematically, and the message repeated throughout goes like this: The best life for human beings is the life of moral and intellectual virtue lived in community with others, the chief community of which is the city. The good city is the city with good urban design. Which is what? Very simply, it is a city full of mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, the vision articulated by advocates of the New Urbanism, or "traditional urbanism," as Bess calls it.
Designs for a good urban experience, Bess explains, would take into consideration the ecological, economic, moral, and formal well-being of a neighborhood. Whether on the outskirts of a city or in the urban core, each neighborhood would enjoy "a walkable and mixed-use human environment wherein many if not most of the necessities and activities of daily human life are within a five- to ten-minute walk for persons of all ages and economic classes." Such neighborhoods would embody the best social and aesthetic features of historic urban life, and to bring this vision to fruition would be to occasion human flourishing. Good urban planning is good theology.
The enemy to this vision is Suburban Sprawl. Call it the Anti-Urban Experience. Bess reckons it a manifestation of fallen modernity: a functionally secular, therapeutic, individualist, technologically enamored vision driven by an oppressive demand for novelty and the "bottom line." Modernity, in this telling, not only underestimates human sin, it overestimates "the redemptive power of steel, glass, and electricity." Its public spaces are dominated by the "sacred" presence of commercial buildings and retail complexes. And its great fruit is suburban sprawl.
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