City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present by Alex Krieger (review)

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...