"The Soul and the City"

A long essay, well wroth reading, by Wilfred McClay, on the connections between our "built environments" and our souls.  I'm reminded of the work -- for example, "Til We Have Built Jerusalem" -- of MOJ-friend (and my colleague) Philip Bess. The essay begins:

Even with all our prosperity and freedom, there is much that is amiss in the ways we live today—not only in our individual lives, but in the larger patterns of habitation that we have devised for ourselves. The built environment matters, not only for our bodies but for our souls, and the souls of our brothers and sisters and neighbors.

Somehow we all know this to be the case. And yet Christians, as Christians, seem to have had very little that is useful or insightful to say about these matters. This represents a serious failure on our part. . . .

More:

The great cautionary example here is the urban-renewal movement of the postwar era, a well-intentioned but disastrous effort undertaken with all the arrogant blindness of which high-minded social engineers and visionaries are capable. They “knew” what was best for the urban poor, and in forcing it upon them, demolished countless acres of existing historically rooted neighborhoods in favor of grim and soulless housing projects. These “improvements” uprooted and decimated countless human lives, depriving them of nearly every vestige of what was familiar to them. We should not romanticize the difficult conditions of the slums they replaced. But the wanton erasure of memory wrought by “renewal” was perhaps the greatest indignity of all—by robbing the inhabitants of their sense of relationship to their own past, they robbed the city of a piece of its very soul. 

Our reflections need to begin, then, with a consideration of what cities are, and are for, what they accomplish that can be accomplished no other way. Indeed, given the strong emphasis on the individual in our times, we would do well to begin with an even more fundamental question. Do we really need to dwell together?

That's easy: Yes, we do. It is a fundamental part of our nature. . .