Urbanism and Liturgy: Bess responds

A few weeks ago, I blogged about an interesting essay by Paul Grenier and Tim Patitsas called "The Liturgy of the City Street."  "Why are good cities such a rarity in America?", they ask.  "Why are so many of our cities and towns lifeless and ugly—and hard to love?  What are they missing?  It’s the spirit of the liturgy."  They ask:

Why is it that despite all this well-financed New Urbanism, we still have practically no cities in the United States that rival in their humanity even an average small town in Mexico or Macedonia, to say nothing of a Paris or a Prague? Why is it that the more money we throw at building 'traditional' new 'developments', the more banal and pointless they become?

The problem is not with Jacobs' and Alexander's ideas, which are profound. The problem is the superficial way in which developers and city planners understood and implemented them. Not surprisingly, they acted on the ideas that were most easily absorbed into the logic of "free market" real estate development. The problem is, it's this same logic that's hostile to the entire spirit of Jacobs' and Alexander's recommendations.

Exactly what is that spirit? It's the spirit of the liturgy. . .

In response, MOJ-friend Philip Bess writes:

I read and enjoyed the Grenier / Patitsas essay, and even forwarded it around to various colleagues and New Urbanist listservs; to which I got virtually zero response, about which I speculate a little below.  In my reading of the essay there are two basic theses:  1) that the organization of economic life in modern societies works against the creation of good urbanism, insofar as modern capitalism commodifies built environments what were once made by communities.  [I'm no Marxist---indeed, I'm a culturally-constrained-free-market kind of guy---but it's hard to deny Marx' claim that:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.  It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.  All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed [human relations] become antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. . . . The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.  It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

2) what's missing from the attempts of even neo-traditionalist urbanists such as the CNU is "the spirit of the liturgy," of which the essay provides an alleged example in what sounds in fact like a not-so great urban environment formally speaking, i.e., the old suburban mall being demolished in favor of a new (and allegedly New Urbanist) development.  In spite of the essay's entirely fitting invocation of Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, and its acknowledgment of the time factor in urbanism, most New Urbanists I know would be put off by being *identified* with chain retail stores (though there is debate among New Urbanists about the merits of the global economy); but above all would be put off by and / or fail to understand the idea of "the spirit of the liturgy"---notwithstanding that I suspect many New Urbanists would indeed be sympathetic with the ideas of a different sense of time and purpose that the authors ascribe to liturgical sensibilities.  I myself think that "sacramental sensibility" rather than "the spirit of the liturgy"---because the former, though Catholic, is less exclusively Catholic than the latter---more aptly describes what the authors are getting at (though I suspect we are talking about the same thing).  But I suspect neither term is going to have much cache among New Urbanists, notwithstanding that such language does, I think, describe *precisely* the sensibility New Urbanists seek but lack the shared vocabulary to describe.

To me the irony is that New Urbanists imagine, mistakenly, that the City is more universal than the Church; when in fact the Church is rather a different and more universal and inclusive kind of City.  But that is a theological proposition, one that few New Urbanists have time or inclination to consider, notwithstanding that I do believe that the kinds of places that inspire New Urbanists, and the telos at which New Urbanists aim, are precisely those sacramentally-charged "holy" places imbued with what Christopher Alexander has aptly characterized as "the quality that has no name."  In fact however, that quality---though mysterious--- *does* have a name, at least among Catholics---and when western culture was more Catholic, western cities possessed more of that Quality.  That Quality is a sense of the sacred, the presence of holiness, which in the Catholic Christian understanding is the presence of love.

[For B-16's latest meditations on God and love, see:  http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/ hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html  ]

On the one hand therefore, it is just this quality of love---of an environment which is self-evidently a product of people who love it---that I presume is characteristic of the suburban Italian restaurant the passing of which the authors lament, and that made this restaurant such a great place---even if (as I suspect) the mall in which it was located was not.  At the same time, it is likewise characteristic of good urban environments that they become that way *precisely* because they have been and are loved by persons and communities who love them enough to want them to be beautiful.  And while the market can and does place a cash value on the urban products of loving sensibilities, the sensibility itself is not something that the market by itself can produce.  Most New Urbanists I know do in fact understand this.  What I fear we do not understand generally is that love is of God; and that, in the words of TS Eliot, "There is not life that is not lived in community, and no community not lived in praise of God."