Abstract
The modern city is the prism of the growing social and aesthetic dilemmas of contemporary civilization. Growing numbers of the wealthy live in gated private communities, providing their own services, and withdrawing from civic engagement other than as means to wealth accumulation. Inequality grows to the point where the rich exclude the poor from the public cores of cities such as London, Manhattan and Beijing and those who perform essential services are increasingly forced to commute for hours, polluting the skies of rich and poor alike in so doing. In this beautifully produced and well-written book, Philip Sheldrake brings together modern urban theory and design with theology, philosophy and spirituality. He argues that the modern division of cities into specialist zones of activity, and by social class, arises from a secular conception of cities that neglects their meaning and origin in ancient Israel and Greece, and in medieval Christendom, as places of work and residence intrinsically shaped by politics and the sacred.
In the first part of the book the history and theology of the Christian city is told, from Augustine’s City of God and Monastic Rule through the monastic movement and the reformations. A key medieval development was the transition of monastic learning from rural monasteries to urban cathedral schools and universities. This paralleled the growing economic power of cities as gatherings of craftsmen and merchants, and hallowed burgeoning cities as places of learning and worship. At the same time urban monastic movements, parish almshouses and hospitals created sanctuary for those whom the new mercantile ethos threatened to cast aside. A related development is described in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when spiritual visions of a greener and more just industrial urbanism than that of the death-dealing cities of Victorian Britain emerged among pioneers such as George Cadbury at Bourneville, Robert Owen at New Lanark, and William Lever at Port Sunlight.
In the second part Sheldrake takes up his earlier insightful writing on sacred place and shows how the pollution, ugliness and social division that mar modern urbanism could be repaired and transformed through a rediscovery of the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the human experience of place. Against the Modernist adulation of mobility at the expense of community, and of function at the expense of beauty, Sheldrake joins with phenomenologists such as Bachelard, De Certeau and Heidegger in arguing for a rediscovery of the intrinsically narrated and emplaced character of human community and identity. The recognition of place in fostering human flourishing and moral character underwrites the need to find ways of redesigning cities so as to reconcile their growing social divisions and divisions of function, including their unsustainable ecological footprints. Cities in which public space is regenerated with meeting and mutuality between citizens as the first priority, rather than the movement of vehicles or the maximization of consumption opportunities, will also be cities where civic virtues and hopeful participation in politics are recovered.
In this book Sheldrake exposes the pathologies of an increasingly urbanizing civilization which has lost touch with those aesthetic, moral and spiritual qualities which gave rise to what are still recognized as some of the greatest urban forms, in the cities of classical Greece and medieval Italy. And he makes a powerful case for the continuing necessity and civilizing power of the Christian sacramental vision of cities as places shaped by communities of care, craft, learning and worship if the modern and postmodern city is not to fragment into a dystopia where people can no longer dwell together without security guards, surveillance and mutual distrust.