The future of religious spaces (VI)

 

Every year about this time, Faith and Form produces its worldwide survey of the best in religious art and architecture--mostly architecture, because "[f]or the second year in a row, the jury was concerned about the low number of Religious Art entries" (Crosbie 2019). It's fascinating, eye-catching, and an opportunity to reflect on the roles religion and religious places play in our common life.

It's also the time when Christians like me celebrate the birth of Jesus. We have appropriated Jewish prophecy like that of Isaiah, who may or may not have been discussing the Messiah when he wrote:

A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.... He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. (Isaiah 11:1, 3b-4, NRSV)

Hearing these familiar verses again this year, I was struck by the seemingly casual reference to the killing that needed to happen to achieve the peace and justice of the "holy mountain" eventually proclaimed in verse 9. Again with the killing! which seems to be a prerequisite for Biblical promises. God's ways are beyond the scope of this blog, but it altogether too tempting to believe that things will be great once we (the hands of God?) first get rid of all the wicked/idiots/haters/evildoers. This is a prime example of what philosopher Martha Nussbaum (The Monarchy of Fear, Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 81-84) calls the "just world hypothesis"--the belief that I would get what I want if I weren't thwarted by bad guys--a worldview that leads to destructive, retributive anger. Instead of anger we need to affirm a common life, right this very minute, to deal with all humanity has to deal with. Excising the other only saps our energy and most likely adds to the evil instead of solving it.

The Christian apostle Paul offers us a rhetorical way out of this trap. In his letter to the Roman church, he writes of the believer dying to sin (see esp. ch. 6). How this death is accomplished seems to be a combination of divine grace, individual effort, and good old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy (see O'Brien 2012). That need not detain us here; we need only to accept that religious language about killing the wicked can apply to the evil within each of us, rather than some definitive expulsion of some individuals for the ultimate happiness of others.

Back to this year's award-winners. Leaving judgments about art and architecture to the professionals, and recognizing that what happens within places is as important as how they're designed, we urbanists can ask: How do the physical features of religious places help us achieve connection in a disconnected world?

One way is to bring us, for a time, away from the world into a place apart. Spectacular sanctuaries, like Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross, can achieve that by creating its own world of wonder.

Cathedral of the Holy Cross won an award for renovation

Usually these grand sanctuaries have spectacular acoustics as well, so those who raise their voices in song or prayer become part of a greater whole. Through our encounter with the divine, we are re-centered for life in the world.

Another way is to arrange seating in a circle around the altar, rather than having everyone in the congregation facing the same direction, as in Seattle's St. Anne Church.

St. Anne Church won an award for renovation

Author James F. White (Protestant Worship and Church Architecture, Oxford University Press, 1964) argues this older form, abandoned for awhile, emphasizes communal worship rather than individual emotional reaction in a hierarchical setting. (See especially chapters 4 and 5.) Shifting from my experience to our action also re-orients us to a world of diverse people.

Most urbanist of all is the religious building that is accessible to the street, such as St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, which fronts directly onto Park Avenue in Manhattan--a block from the #6 subway line.

St. Bart's Church won a restoration award for its dome, which is not relevant to this post

This is the "meaningful destination easily accessible on foot" commended by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck and Jeff Speck (Suburban Nation, North Point Press, 2010 rev. ed., p. 64). In fact, it contributes to all four of their prerequisites for the street life--meaningful destinations, safe streets, comfortable streets, interesting neighborhood--needed to support community. Contrast that with the award-winning new church, St. Luke the Evangelist in suburban Ankeny, Iowa...

St. Luke the Evangelist Catholic Church

...which opens onto a parking lot accessible from Weigel Drive only by a long driveway. Neither it nor the school next door will ever be walkable. (It's not even clear how you would walk from one to the other.) No one will ever happen by.

Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, [1961] 1993, pp.72-73) waxed eloquent about the social utility of public spaces like sidewalks that are building blocks of connected neighborhoods.

They bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion....

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eying the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded....

The sum of such casual public contact at a local level--most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone--is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.

The intentional design of religious places, new and old, architectural wondrous and humbly utilitarian, can contribute substantially to the public identity that will sustain us all through whatever lies ahead. Or not.

Primary Source: Michael J. Crosbie (ed), "2019 International Awards Program for Religious Art and Architecture," Faith and Form 52:4 (2019). All photos are from the article, and are used without permission.

Last Year's Model: "The Future of Religious Spaces (V)," 28 December 2018

Cities in the 2020s

These are the days of miracle and wonder--PAUL SIMON

This week, National Public Radio's "Marketplace Morning Report" discussed economic forecasts by the Oxford Economic Group which expects weak global economic growth in the near future, including the U.S. (Safo 2019). Actual results may vary, of course, and the authors suggest the cities best situated for a prosperous early 2020s are those outstanding on dimensions of economic mix, cost of living, and quality of life. So the U.S. urban economy expected to grow the most in 2020-21 is... San Francisco??

I'm not questioning the report's methodology, rather taking it as read, because [a] it's proprietary, and [b] I'm cheap. But San Francisco's cost of living is infamously high, particularly housing. Its cost of living ranked #2 among U.S. cities in 2019 by Kiplinger, trailing only the Borough of Manhattan (which is only part of a city), thanks to "years of relentless growth driven by high-paid tech workers." Average apartment rent: $3821 a month. So, given their criteria, however is San Francisco #1?

Put another way, if San Francisco is in the best position in spite of its ridiculously high housing costs, what does that say about the rest of the country? For example, what is going to happen in Chicago, which ranks at the bottom of Oxford's list, thanks to the frightening budget and tax picture in the State of Illinois? What about small cities and rural areas, which can't compete with the big places for economic mix (or, arguably, for quality of life)?

The "winner-take-all" nature of the post-industrial economy applies not only to individuals but also to places (though see Sawhill 2019 for the argument that this situation results from political choices as well as economic fundamentals). In the modern tech economy, wrote Emily Badger (cited below) in The New York Times around the time Amazon made its HQ2 announcement, cities that already have wealth, opportunity, highly educated workers and high salaries will just keep attracting more of them.... A small number of rich and internationally connected cities keep increasing their economic advantages--and as a result, the inequality widens between them and everywhere else.

It looks like the 2020s will feature a big shakeout. I hope it won't hurt, but it probably will. Interestingly, Brookings scholars' list of the biggest economic stories of the 2010s focus less on places than on individuals (tax cuts for the rich, rising inequality, lower life expectancy, fewer teens in the workforce) and systems (monetary policy stuck on full-blast, good news on health care access and cost, no worker productivity gains, aging population). But it's fair to say that the fall-out from most of these individual- and system-level trends will impact localities, too, and not all localities to the same degree. Localities will have, already have, fewer resources to address either rising individual vulnerabilities or cutthroat economic competition.

Maybe the 2020s will be the placid sort of decade in which these sorts of issues can be thoughtfully sorted out. The 2010s certainly were, when you compare them to its immediate predecessor which featured a small recession, a massive terrorist attack, a debilitating war, and finally the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The 2010s have been quite a breather, comparatively, apart from a series of unforced errors. Future generations may well wonder why we squandered this opportunity in government shutdowns, highway construction, and the odoriferous politics of Donald Trump. The tasks of the 2020s will be hard enough without the possibility of additional pressure from:

• an economic downturn
• employment issues for the rest (of workers, of places)
• natural disasters exacerbated by climate change
• increasing refugee flows
• increasing homelessness, due to rising incidence of mental illness and/or poverty (see Hu 2019)
• changes in energy prices and supply
• intensified inter-group hostility
• crumbling infrastructure on which maintenance has been deferred too long

Pete Saunders, a planner and blogger from the industrial Midwest, anticipates the decade to come might fulfill the transition period underway throughout the 2010s, turning away from the auto-centric era that ran from World War II until the last decade's housing crisis.

Our development future will be even more urban.  It will be based more on the mobility options and opportunities --autonomous and alternatively fueled vehicles -- that will expand this century.  It will be more economically unequal in America, as America's economy becomes more equal with the rest of the world.   And our development patterns will be something that will adapt to the demands put on it by climate change. [For the next twenty years:] The rebirth of cities actually does take hold nationally, as growth filters downward from our superstar coastal cities to other cities.  Interior cities will tout their assets and amenities and become cheaper alternatives to the coasts. (Saunders 2019)

This fulfillment will be facilitated if millennials stay in cities, as seems to be happening where such opportunities exist (Lewyn 2019), rather than coming to expect the same subsidized suburban development their parents came to expect. It will require the masters of capital to notice all the talent in the cost-efficient interior of the country, and to move to take advantage of it, and for interior cities to position themselves for strength--culturally as well as physically and financially. It will require a willingness to adapt to climate change, even if we have to call it something else to soothe the deniers.

Some days my town seems to be about attracting entrepreneurs and removing obstacles to traditional development, and some days its long-term plan seems to consist of subdivisions and strip malls, not to mention the casino. I guess the glass is never entirely full, nor is it entirely empty, and that history progresses incrementally, even imperceptibly. Whatever this new decade brings, may there always be voices of hope and visions of common life.

SOURCES:
 Emily Badger, "The Same Cities Keep Attracting Tech. Why?" New York Times, 8 November 2018, B1, B2
 Winnie Hu, "Please, Don't Have a Seat," New York Times, 8 November 2019, A22
 Michael Lewyn, "Are Cities Really Losing Millennials?" Planetizen, 23 December 2019
 Nova Safo, "Economic Growth for U.S. Cities Will Depend on Mix of Industries," Marketplace, 23 December 2019
 Pete Saunders, "Revisiting the 'Big Theory' on American Urban Development," Corner Side Yard, 23 December 2019

SEE ALSO: "What Defined the Decade Since CityLab Launched," CityLab, 30 December 2019
EARLIER POSTS:
"Globalization's Challenge to Cities," 25 June 2016
"Can Cities Change Their Luck?" 20 June 2016
"Two Tales of Cities," 7 June 2016