What the New Urbanists Forgot

In a fine article in the May 2 Weekly Standard , Joel Kotkin emphasizes the historical prominence of religion in urban life. He argues that “places like Fargo, a booming high-tech city on the Great Plains, are more in sync with ancient urban tradition than are supposed paragons of American city life like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, much less the classical centers of Rome, London, and Paris. In these cities, for the most part, religion – with the notable exception of Islam – is on the decline, as churches and religious schools close and attendance dwindles to miniscule levels.” Yet, historically, religion has played a central role in urban life; even in American cities whose beating heart was commerce, churches helped “assimilate and education the growing numbers of immigrants who swarmed into the new country,” and Protestantism “underpinned the reformist impulse in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere that surfaced in the later decades of the 19th century.” All this is lost on new urbanists: “Religion is not exactly a hot topic among new urbanists, who seem to think that good design, coupled with good intentions, is a substitute for a grounded sense of moral order.” But striking landscapes, architecture, and the “socially important myths” that are fostered by the urban environment cannot provide what religion does: “It is a source of moral order and spiritual sustenance. The earliest city dwellers confronted problems vastly different from those faced in prehistoric nomadic communities and agricultural villages. Urbanites had to learn how to co-exist and interact with strangers from outside their clan or tribe. This required them to develop new ways to codify behavior and determine what would be commonly acceptable in family life, commerce, and social discourse. In doing so, they drew upon their religious heritage – not only in the West but virtually everywhere. The earliest cities in India, China, and Mesoamerica all displayed similar attachment to religious principles, suggesting, as the American historican T. R. Fehrenbach notes, the existence of a common sensibility among early city-builders in all parts of the world.” Of course, “religion” does not exist; only religions do. And different religions can form quite different types of urban community. But Kotkin’s point is still well-taken.