num_pages: 464
description: 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.
language: English
title: City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present
publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press