© Philip Bess Professor, Andrews University, Michigan - Notes

I. Introduction

II. The Nature of the City

III. Sources of Renewal

IV. Theology, Nature, & Architectural Education

July 2001

THE NATURE OF THE CITY

propose that the city is understood best as a community of communities, the foremost purpose of which is to enable its citizens to live the best life possible. This proposition is broadly Aristotelian in its outlines; and for human beings the end it identifies is comprehensive, for human beings do not seek the best life possible for the sake of something else. Clearly, there is considerable disagreement today about both the good life for human beings and the nature and ends of the city; and I will discuss some of those disagreements shortly. But our language itself testifies to this ancient understanding of the city as a community of communities, for the very word "politics" designates the art of ordering in right relationship the various communities comprising the polis.

          As a community of communities, the city exists dynamically and simultaneously as an environmental order, an economic order, a moral order, and a formal order; and these orders interact in tense, conflicting, complex and unpredictable ways. Nevertheless, we can see for ourselves that cities are the most prominent way in which the human animal inhabits the landscape; can see the economic order of the city embodied in commercial and familial institutions; can see the moral order of the city in institutions of religion, law, medicine, education, politics, and family; and can see the formal order of the city in architecture and urban design.

          Within the larger community of the city, smaller communities provide occasions and social, physical, and cultural contexts within which the purposes of architecture are partially defined. Architects have traditionally given greater attention and prestige to the public and civic spaces of the city, by giving formal primacy to public and civic buildings fronting and defining such spaces. Why have we done this? Generally, I suspect it is because there has been a mutual recognition among members of smaller communities within the city that what they have in common is their status as citizens. And specific to architects, there has also been a recognition that well designed civic spaces are both a symbol and an artifact of the urban community of which architects themselves are part.

          This understanding of the ends of architecture, the ends of the city, and their relationship to one another does not deny inherent tensions between the pragmatic, formal, and civic purposes of architecture; nor does it deny that there will always be differences among citizens about the nature of our common good and how best to achieve it. But this understanding does presume that ideas of "the good life" and "the common good" are live ideas; and it also presumes that architects understand themselves to be citizens as well as architects--implying among other things that architects are members of, and therefore have obligations to, more than one community.^[1]

          From shared and living notions of "the good life," "the common good," "membership" and "obligation," coherent theories and practices of architecture and city making can follow. But I think it is precisely our misery as a profession and as educators that both the culture of architecture and our larger political culture currently lack such shared and live notions.[2] And notwithstanding the urgings from the Boyer Report^[3] and other quarters that the architectural profession and architectural education reorient ourselves to the making and sustaining of "community," I see few professional and educational programs today with the cultural, intellectual, and institutional resources needed to sustain such an enterprise.

next chapter >>  Sources of Renewal

back to top