In what style should we plan?: Unity,discontinuity and the ‘complex spacing’ of the nation form

Brock Moneo (2025) proposes that we examine the historical small town as a ‘nation form’, and in so doing, gestures primarily towards Alex Krieger's City on a Hill (2019) and Ryan Poll's Main Street and Empire (2012). Both works illuminate the ideological formation of the American small town, and whilst both carefully approach the relationship between spatial form and moral regeneration, there are fundamental questions about style and the reception of symbols and tradition in architecture which both remain undertheorised and are necessary to respond to the proposition Brock Moneo sets out. This is a risky operation at the heart of New Urbanism, where a received design grammar of the New England small town becomes charged with eschatological claims about civilisational renewal. To contextualise this risk, and to identify where it might be examined empirically, I trace some citational strata through these texts, chalk-marking shapes through footnotes where sources prove aporetic.

The intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers has written magisterial accounts of early progressive ideas in transatlantic circulation (Atlantic Crossings, 1998) and of the uneven canonisation of Winthrop's sermon (As a City on a Hill, 2018). Atlantic Crossings does not take up the small town as a spatial form and Rodgers' As a City on a Hill does not examine how the eschatological charge of the covenanted community became attached to the design grammar of the New England village, an attachment lively amongst early progressive boosterists. This is not a criticism of Rodgers, who set out to do other things. But questions around the origin and intelligibility of the small town emerging from debates on New Urbanism suggest a productive reading across his works. The two lineages converge in the late twentieth century, but by different routes. On the side of political rhetoric, Rodgers tracing the entrance of Winthrop's sermon through Reagan. On the spatial-typological side, almost contemporaneously, the early progressive ideal of the small town as a site of a covenanted community re-entered national discourse through the disruptions to suburban house-building made by early New Urbanists. The two are not unconnected, and share archival resources. Stephenson's (2002) study of New Urbanism's debt to John Nolen, the early progressive planner who helped introduce the Garden City Movement to the United States, was conducted with the Nolen Papers held at Cornell. Rodgers (1998; esp. Chapter 7) draws extensively on the same collection of Nolen's papers for Atlantic Crossings. The conjuncture where moral regeneration and spatial form meet that these questions foreground is precisely what New Urbanism inherits, often without recognition, and what its early critics quickly cautioned against. Before turning to the theoretical resources that might illuminate this conjuncture, let's establish why and how the historiographic tracing matters.

The uses of history and the small town as a form

A reader familiar with the literature on the American small town will likely have encountered Page Smith's As a City upon a Hill (1966). Smith claimed to inaugurate the historical study of the small town as a form while drawing liberally on 19th and 20th-century sources. Poll’s (2012) cursory reading dismisses this as incongruous out of hand, but there is a deeper methodological point to be made. Rodgers (2018) supplies the leverage for that point, though obliquely, and against the grain of his own purpose in his As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (2018, see Chapters 16 and 17). He dates the transit of Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity (1630) from a regional New England text to a foundational document for national self-description to the 1980s, when Reagan made the ‘city on a hill’ line a stock phrase of presidential rhetoric by the close of the century (Rodgers, 2018: 207–208).

Placed against that chronology, Smith's (1966) title acquires another chronological incongruity. As a City upon a Hill was published over a decade before the reception Rodgers locates picks up towards the late 1970s. If the reception of Winthrop' sermon is genuinely late and uneven, settling into common usage in the 1980's, by what warrant does a book in the mid-sixties already wear the phrase as its title, without any visible strain? While Rodgers has reconstructed one reception of A Model of Christian Charity into a nationalised presidential discourse with exemplary care, there is another earlier line of inheritance which compliments his study: it runs through the boosterist and early progressive literatures which had already staked, to varying degrees, the moral intelligibility of the nation upon the spatial form of the small town, and it is this wager, rather than the later, nationalised civic myth, that Smith's title inherits. Smith's method is itself instructive, as he is self-consciously writing within the field of what Rabinow would call his ‘assembled contemporary’ (Rabinow, 2011), understood here as the bounds of living memory with his relations. In the mid-century, this field stretched back through the 1850s. ¹ Smith's book emerged, by his own account, both as a dialogic account and a formative attempt at a historical survey. Go ahead and open it; the book begins with a deferral to conversations with John H. Holmes, ‘then in his ninety-ninth year’. Holmes's grandfather had fought in the American Revolution; his family had preserved a copy of the abolitionist magazine The Liberator since the 1850s. Through the intimacy of relations, Holmes gives Smith his vivid and immediate sense of town life (Smith, 1966: vii–viii).

Smith also claims in 1966 that the historical study of the town “is in its infancy” and that his book “presumes to bring it to birth.” Only on a cursory reading of his precise object of study does this claim sit oddly with the evidence. Smith draws on 19-century village boosterists, early progressive reformers and 20th-century novelists who had written the small town into American consciousness for generations. He cites Thorstein Veblen's (1934) dictum that the country town is ‘perhaps the greatest’ of American institutions. The small town as an topic of fascination was not new, but what Smith attempted, and what none of his predecessors had tried, was to treat this morally charged figure as a subject for historical survey. The book is better read as an experiment in historical reception: an approach to an object already bearing the weight of the covenanted community, an attempt to make it available for historical study while acknowledging the wager in historical determinism that such study entails.

From the class-focused British ‘history from below’ of the 1960s (e.g. Thompson, 1963, 1966) which crossed the Atlantic into American labour and social history (e.g. Lemisch, 1968) and the application of a recuperative logic to try to encounter and recover the agency of racialised and minoritised people from recieved historiographic accounts of the transatlantic slave trade (e.g. Blassingame, 1972; Davis, 1971), a surfeit of revisionist debates within academic history abounded at the time. All of this raised questions about whether the searching for and recovery of often marginalised histories risked its own essentialism: the stylisation and construction of the subjects and objects it claimed to find. Hence, the debates within academic history on the mythology of conceptual coherence (e.g. Skinner, 1969) and the suggestion that narrative itself constitutes rather than discovers historical continuity (e.g. White, 1973). Smith, for one, distrusted the relativism such arguments implied but remained unusually self-aware about the essentialism his method required (see Smith, 1964). His work can be read as amongst a wide-ranging series of experiments in the uses of history, placing various wagers on the moral intelligibility of the past. ²

Why, then, did a familiar figure of the covenanted community enter American national discourse in the 1980s, and by what passages did it come to be articulated as a referent for the production of spatial form? In As a City on a Hill (2018), Rodgers takes up the first half of this question, demonstrating that Winthrop's sermon achieved canonisation as foundational American scripture only with Perry Miller and the Cold War. Far from constituting an everlasting tradition, the covenanted community entered national discourse late and unevenly. Winthrop's sermon was, in its 17th-century context, one of many ‘holy’ and political ‘experiments’ across the various forms of territorial and colonial settlement, whose outcomes remained contested and genuinely uncertain (Rodgers, 2018: 48–51). Puritan typology had a conditional and aporetic quality: scriptural figures opening onto futures whose unfolding remained undetermined. Winthrop himself would not have gone so far as to claim certainty for his political project as the chosen one; to follow, by way of analogy, the guidance biblical typology offered was the most one could do. The intimacy of this hermeneutic tradition, and the contingencies it produced, were suppressed in the Cold War canonisation, which reified instead a self-assured certainty about the destiny of the American political project. As Rodgers shows, Reagan's redeployment of the ‘city on a hill’ figure across his political rhetoric of the 1980s evacuated this conditional uncertainty, fastening the phrase to the flat determinism of American exceptionalism (Rodgers, 2018: 203–206).

Krieger and Poll: partial illuminations

Krieger's retrospective (2019, esp. Chapter 4) leads us through the ambivalent relationship between Harvard's Graduate School of Design and New Urbanism. Peering through the occasionally polemical debates, we can trace with interest the overlapping, divergent and entangled genealogies of urban design at Harvard (c. 1959–60; see Krieger and Saunders, 2010), landscape architecture and ecological urbanism (c. 2010; see Mostafavi and Doherty, 2010), and New Urbanism itself, held at arm's length through various permutations, though intersecting at times.

With hindsight, Krieger contextualises New Urbanism in a few ways. First, he disarticulates the originary New England covenanted community from the incremental village boosterism which, through an uneven history of booms and busts, produced the received design grammar of the New England small town. To do so, Krieger draws on Handlin's architectural history (1979: 96), which in turn draws primary sources from early progressive urbanological writings, including Warren H. Manning's account of ‘The History of Village Improvement in the United States’ (Manning, 1904), whilst also lamenting that ‘there has been no extended history of village improvement’ (Handlin, 1979: 499). Krieger cites Mumford, Veblen, and H. P. Douglass, a 19th-century town boosterist and pastor remembered in the American theological academy as a ‘student of the reciprocal influence of urban life and church life’ (Fichter, 1960). For all three, the unitary image of the New England small town transposed a vision of the Puritan covenanted community as an originary site of American culture.

As we saw with Page Smith, transgenerational entanglements are often uncanny in retrospect. Lewis Mumford lived until 1990, around which time a small wave of scholarship emerged in revaluation of his work (e.g. Hughes and Hughes, 1990; Miller, 1989). One obituary observed that with ‘Mumford's death on January 26, 1990, we lose one of the last survivors of the left-liberal culture of early-20th-century New York: the New York of Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Malcolm Cowley, Dorothy Day, and many others […] There are few surviving voices trying to translate the prophetic and utopian languages of the 19th century into a modern radicalism’ (Blake, 1991). The coincidence of small town with the covenanted community persists across these early progressive and 20th-century discourses, carried forward into the mainstream of New Urbanism as a sense of continuity with an inheritance of ‘neo-traditional’ architecture. In extremis, this approaches a teleological claim linking spatial form to moral regeneration, which, as Harvey (1997) noted, has long been one of the propositional risks within neo-traditionalism that has kept elite universities at arm's length from New Urbanism.

Second, Krieger documents and gives credit to the interventions New Urbanism made to disrupt the complacency and typologies of suburban housebuilding at the end of the 20th century. In so doing, he returns to the specific documentation of New Urbanism's early interventions with the Clinton administration at HUD and the Department of Transportation in the 1990s. The federal embrace of New Urbanist principles during the Clinton years can be traced through a constellation of primary documents; one might take up Krieger's suggestion to re-examine this relationship closely in its own terms. ³

Poll (2012) deftly weaves through 19th- and 20th-century historical studies and literary representations of the American small town, but his major contribution is to connect us with a parallel tradition to New Urbanism in the 1990s: debates on the ideological and vernacular forms of nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism emerging from one corner of the poststructuralist ‘linguistic turn’. Poll's argument of the small town as a ‘nation form’ carries forward from Balibar (1990), Brennan (1990) and Žižek (1989).

Poll's argument is assembled from several key theoretical moves. First, Balibar's argument that nations do not possess ethnic bases naturally but that populations are, through a fictive process, ‘ethnicised’, represented as if they formed a natural community when no such community exists. Second, Brennan's insight is that modern nations require cultural forms, especially literary ones, to become imaginable at all, so that a longing for material form, as in the place of the small town, precedes content. Third, Žižek's reading of Freud: the secret to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form but the secret of the form itself. Poll synthesises these strands to argue that the dominant American small town operates as a spatialised nation form: not a real place but a repeatable ideological structure, one that can be located anywhere and can ‘implant the United States in any space’.

All of this is clarifying. It helps to disarticulate what Sayer (1992) would call the ‘chaotic conception’ of the small town: an imagined pattern language carrying forward the ideal of the New England small town on one hand, and a sense of social and moral regeneration furnished by a historical reception of the Puritan covenant on the other. ⁴

Poll's poststructuralist framework disarticulates the naturalised unity of the small town as a nation form. We’re now left to engage with the architectural debates on the reception of style and tradition, through which we might examine New Urbanism more closely. The New Urbanism debates themselves do not furnish us with the tools to approach the risky relation between spatial form and political ontology that remains undertheorised within the movement. For this, I turn to Andrew Benjamin.

Complex spacing and the question of style

Andrew Benjamin's corpus extends along a different thread of the poststructuralist debates. In Style and Time (2006) Benjamin articulates both a theoretical account of the disjunctive reception of tradition within architecture, and furnishes these discussions with robust empirical resources through the specific expression of particular debates: beginning with the German Stilfrage (style debates) inaugurated by Hübsch (1992), and the early progressive relationship to Jugendstil (the German and Austrian Art Nouveau, c. 1895–1910), including Walter Benjamin's later writing on it.

In so doing, in an excellent and precise essay (Ch. 3, 2006), Andrew Benjamin draws on the resources from the German Stilfrage, which were inaugurated by Hübsch's In What Style Should We Build (1992); an English reprint of the suite of debates this inaugurated was published open access by Getty in the 1990s. Benjamin compares the opening of the interrogative mode in Hübsch from the tradition of mimesis in Wincklemann, and in the expression of Raphael and Michaelangelo's painting; whereby the criteria for style and appearance were already determined within the dimensions of romantic hellenism by mimesis; the criterion by which style was to be judged as such. Hübsch, to Benjamin, inaugurates a question (which, unwittingly, perhaps, but at its best, New Urbanism also may be asking); with the severance of the unification of style and appearance brought forward by modernity, how are we to relate to the transmission of symbols? Benjamin makes three more manoeuvres through Boetticher in the 1850s, 70 years later in 1910 with Behrens, and then Walter Benjamin's reading of Jugenstil (the German art nouveau – approx. 1895 to 1910) as the collapse into interiority of the stylisation of style. I can’t find direct evidence that anyone from the New Urbanism movement specifically engaged with the Herrmann translation of the Stilfrage debate. This is a bit surprising given the thematic resonance and the coinciding timing of the publication in 1992 (the CNU was founded in 1993).

To light on one of Benjamin's manoeuvres here, in the expansive reception of Hübsch across the following decades of the Stilfrage, Karl Boetticher's distinction between Werkform and Kunstform, introduced in Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1852), provides conceptual vocabulary for a reflective practice where, perhaps in extension, we could imagine a reflexive practice on form and formation within an extended topography of architecture, planning and design. In Boetticher, Werkform names the material presence of the architectural object; Kunstform names its semiautonomous interpretive dimension. The philosophical core of Benjamin's argument turns on a distinction between two modes of idealist repetition. Both symbolic repetition (national style as expression of Volksgeist) and formal repetition (abstract internationalism as pure ubiquity of form) subordinate matter to idea. Both leave intact the structure of the Absolute, as the divine, and that which regulates appearance from without. The criterion for the appearance of style, whether in the imitatio of Romantic hellenism or in the biblical typology of the Puritan covenant, is already determined in advance.

Benjamin's resolution lies in what he calls ‘complex spacing’: a mode of ‘anoriginal’ relationality in which alterity functions as constitutive of objects, through ‘the continuity of a complex spacing without end’ (Benjamin, 2006: 76). The phrase ‘without end’ is disjunctive: it marks a temporal structure (the refusal of teleological completion) and a formal structure (the impossibility of closure within any given configuration). Within the disjuncture of modernity, alterity takes the place of the divine, whereby the absolute is understood as an unfolding difference.

Here, we should distinguish Benjamin's relational ontology from other influential traditions in architectural theory. Where a Deleuzian relational ontology familiar to ecological urbanism emphasises a constitutive field of emergence and becoming, Benjamin's account retains a negativity or remainder particular to the iteration of form. Difference is not simply generative but aporetic: it holds apart a latent and unrealised possibility even as it connects. Benjamin's unique contribution is that rather than understanding place merely as a site of encounter between relations, both form and place, in their specificity, contain an internal capacity for repetition, and this opens the architectural project to ongoing difference.

There is a structural parallel here with Rodgers's exegesis of Puritan typology: both thinkers are concerned with how the complexity of inherited temporal structures, conditional, aporetic, open, gets flattened in later appropriation. For Rodgers, the Cold War canonisation of Winthrop's sermon suppressed its conditionality; with Benjamin, we can read the historical continuity of nationalist and internationalist symbolic repetition as risking the suppression of an anoriginal relationality to tradition. The question In what style should we build? as the uses of the past as it informs the complexity of relations in the unfolding present.

The politics of appearance and the ethics of inhabitation

The relation to the nation form that follows from the Stilfrage is articulated through Benjamin's reading of Lyotard. For Benjamin, a disjunctive ‘cosmopolitanism’ gives a name to that which, in refusing the determination of either the national or the international, demands a rethinking of any site of politics involving an inherent commitment to, or inheritance of, the symbol. The critique of style and the critique of nationalism are internally related because both operate through a kind of symbolic regulation: the subordination of the particularity of matter to a broader idea, which is, on examination, flattening. Benjamin's philosophical account gives us resources to ask questions around what he calls the politics of appearance. Any site is already overdetermined; different histories intersect by occurring within different time frames or by generating different temporal possibilities. Their copresence accounts for the complex temporality of the present and allows a kind of disjunctive cosmopolitan to be already possible within the present. ⁵

Collectivity is thereby constituted not through subsumption under a common measure (the affirmation of a community) but through differential relations, through what Benjamin calls ‘the continuity of the discontinuous’. This is the ethical demand relayed across the topography of planning, architecture and design, which refuses the teleological achievement of a final symbolic unity and commits to holding open the space in which we can approach the incompleteness within the very repetition of form as the very structure of an urban and democratic collectivity.

In the face of a disjunctural modernity beset with various forms of polycrisis, some proponents of New Urbanism frame neo-traditional architecture as the grounds for moral regeneration in the face of civilisational decay. We must recognise that, on the grounds of slippage into spatial and historical determinism, debates within New Urbanism are not sufficient to approach these questions of complex spacing, even as the movement both raises and answers, implicitly, the question: In what style should we build? ⁶

A different ethics remains possible across a politics of inhabitation and the topology of the urban professions: one committed to the unfolding and unmasterable quality of space. Such an ethics applies especially to this risky operation of spatialisation, approached here by way of style understood as a mode of complex spacing and politics of appearance. It applies also to the reception of symbols across distinct historical paradigms: biblical typology as it conditioned 17th-century Puritan thinking, where analogical thinking worked through a world of holy experiments whose outcomes remained contested and genuinely uncertain; the covenanted community as it was received within early progressive discourse and the 20th-century American imagination, tangential to major shifts in rural-urban migration and the changing role of the small town, and later flattened through Cold War canonisation into the determinism of American exceptionalism; and the complex spacing of architectural inheritance that Benjamin theorises as anoriginal relationality.

What connects these is a methodological commitment to guard against what Thompson (1963: 12) called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. This is not the sardonic dismissal which can sometimes pass for criticism in popular discourse. It is rather a commitment to eliding the always seductive calls towards the (always normative) determinism of abstract futurism or the imagined continuity of a redemptive past, under whose pretense, erasure and violence in the present is often justified. Here we have a call instead to attend to the complexity of relations which exist and insist in the unfolding present, and to encounter any given work in its unfolding potentiality and the conditions of its emergence.

It is on these grounds, in the specific details of its historical and spatial determinism, that New Urbanism can be gently and reparatively contextualised, and then perhaps studied once more. Such a return would attend particularly to its reception of the early progressive movement, its disruption of suburban housebuilding in the 1980s and 1990s, and its experiments with the Clinton administration through the HOPE VI programme and the Department of Transportation. The return to ongoing relations, to encountering the futurial energies of relations as they emerge in their own terms, is part of the emancipatory spirit of planning in the public interest: an ethics eliding a teleological stasis or fulfilment without forgetting the trace of our rich inheritance of relations in their anoriginal emergence.