Book review: The Space Between

 

swiped from bakeracademic.com

Eric O. Jacobsen, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012), 297 pp.

If Jesus's "dwelling among us" means that he lives as we typically do, he would most likely be living in a subdivision at least a few miles from where he might interact with people in a quasi public setting--like a shopping mall or a grocery store. In this case, Jesus would need to own and operate some kind of automobile simply to have the kind of diverse interaction with people that we see him having in the Gospels... Rather than asking, "What would Jesus drive?" I want to ask, "Why must Jesus drive?" (Jacobsen 2012, pp. 207-208)

(6/18/2026) I first read Eric O. Jacobsen's The Space Between in 2015, after hearing him interviewed by Chuck Marohn on the Strong Towns podcast. (That interview is here, and a subsequent appearance is here.) Dr. Jacobsen, who has been senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church (ECO) in Tacoma, Washington, since 2007, offers a good introduction to urbanist ideas from a communitarian perspective that is accessible to any reader. It is even more pertinent for his fellow Christians, for whom urbanism is presented as how we live our earthly lives as God intends.

While I've employed his ideas frequently since then, particularly when I would write about the religious architecture awards that used to appear annually in Faith and Form, I have never done a systematic review of this outstanding book. I am rectifying that now.

Dr. Eric O. Jacobsen (from fpctacoma.org)

Jacobsen begins by asserting the core importance of the built environment, which he defines as "the physical location and features of the places where you live, work, worship, and play and the way that the various places in your day relate to one another" (pp. 11-12). We should notice these features, he argues, not just move mindlessly through them on our way to some place from some other place. We should ask ourselves: "Who thought this space through, and what can you discern about their values as you interact with it?" (11). How people and stuff interact in a particular place over time--what he calls enacted space (17)--matters for our experience of community. It matters to a unified kingdom approach to Christian life, in which every human activity, not just the churchy stuff, "can be done in a way that is God-honoring" (21).

Before we get to the urbanism in Parts II and III, Jacobsen presents a sort of theology of the individual in Part I, "Orientation," albeit includes some good pictures of streets by way of example. We are human bodies (ch. 1) in specific places (ch. 2), and are meant to be in loving community with others, not autonomous individuals (ch. 3). Community means "the actual human community in which she has found herself" (89), including both voluntary (church, club, friend group) and geographic (anyone in your immediate proximity) communities, but it's the latter community is too easy to neglect.

The boundedness of place has been an important element in relational development. We know one another more deeply when proximity forces us to interact on a regular basis. The contemporary ease by which we can move from one place to another has tended to pull us further apart from one another, rather than bring us closer. (57-58)

People are bound to fall short of our ideal vision of community because of human sinfulness, so community requires grace. It also requires time, because "we cannot buy community" and "we cannot even build community" (100), because community only happens after sustained engagement. And it requires wisdom, the embedded sort of wisdom that evolved institutions contain, not sudden bursts of seemingly rational efforts to remake those institutions. Hence, urbanism good, modernism not so much (ch. 4, esp. pp. 109-118). Missoula, Montana, was saved from modernist overhauling because it was unable to afford it, and now it's glad it stayed the way it was (pp. 90-92).

This traditional block of downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, is chock full
of "thresholds" connecting buildings with the outdoors

Part II, "Participation," gets into how the built environment affects our lives and life choices. Families become more isolated, both from relatives and from neighbors (ch. 5). Churches (ch. 7) used to be embedded in their surrounding neighborhoods, with doors open to the street, and sometimes served as community monuments; today's insular churches are set away from the street, accessible by large parking lots.

Chapter 6, "Politics," talks about how all this matters for the public realm, beginning with the ongoing skirmishes between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses in 1960s New York City. Jacobs stood for civic virtue as opposed to top-down power for power's sake. "Civic virtue can be thought of as a measure of a person's care for the public realm combined with the local knowledge, organizational skills, and courage necessary to effect positive change in that realm" (159). Any of those four aspects is difficult to muster when the built environment is as dependent on automotive transportation as much of America is today. In this context, he discusses the problems of functional zoning, urban renewal, and visionaries like Le Corbusier. He approvingly quotes from the theoretical final chapter of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she argues that cities are problems of "organized complexity," much like human bodies. 

This tells us much about how Jacobs understands transformation to take place among people and practices in the city. She sees in ordinary cities a form that is basically good and assumes the ability of residents to enact a kind of self-repair. The city and its neighborhoods occasionally need outsider intervention to fulfill this potential, but for the most part what they need is less rather than more government intervention. (173)

Modernist architect Rem Koolhaas is introduced as a foil to Jacobs, though I have to admit I like the Seattle Public Library. 

Hudson Street, New York City,
where Jane Jacobs lived between 1947 and 1968

In Part III, "Engagement," Jacobsen uses a theological model called critical correlation to analyze our relationship with the built environment. I'm not a theologian, but I feel I was able to follow the argument. He reframes discussions of sustainability away from voluntary abstinence to seeking to achieve good goals for all (ch. 9): human thriving, environmental stewardship, and social justice. These goals can and do conflict in application (see the graphic from Scott Campbell on p. 236), but they are all served by joint efforts by urban communities rather than individual withdrawal. A sense of place (ch. 10) where one belongs is inextricable from one where strangers can become known--in this context he gives a good capsulation of Ray Oldenburg's third place paradigm (pp. 245-246)--which too turns out to be an obligation for Christians and Jews (cf. Deuteronomy 10:17-19, Exodus 23:9ff.). The chapter concludes with a discussion, from several points of view, of the role of beauty in our places.

Jacobsen's book provides an introduction to urbanist ideas for Christians and Jews, rooted in the familiar language of the Bible. For non-religious urbanists, he points to the possibility of cooperation, giving a view of religion that is different from that propounded by the loudest Christian voices out there. For everyone, he provides a second look at our surroundings that we may have taken for granted all our lives, and to consider why auto-dependency may not be serving us well.

Jackson Boulevard, Chicago