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City on a Hill - Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Hardcover)
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City on a Hill - Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Hardcover)
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A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian
aspirations that shaped them, by one of America's leading urban
planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a
paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given
opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those
messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a
Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has
developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences
of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself
has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar,
macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American
story from the Pilgrims to the "smart city," Krieger delivers a
striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were
the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England
villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age
of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending
plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened
rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers
answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic
architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many
cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban
dreaming and urban renewal-one generation's utopia forming the next
one's nightmare-and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney's EPCOT,
hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger's compelling and richly
illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today,
that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of
dreams gone by.
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