placing the sacred, transcendence and the city

Literature & Theology, Vol. Æ". No. �, September Æ��Ç, pp. Æª�–Æ��doi:"�."�æ�/litthe/frm�Æ� Advance Access Published on � August Æ��Ç

PLAC ING THE SACRED :

TRANSCENDENCE AND

THE C ITY

Philip Sheldrake

Abstract

What do we mean by the sacred? Classical polarisations between the sacred

and the secular are open to question and impact strongly on how we

conceptualise and materialise ‘sacred space’. This essay specifically relates

thinking about sacred space to the meaning and future of cities. It explores

classic Christian understandings of urban sacred spaces as well as of the city

itself as sacred. It then contrasts the thinking of Michel de Certeau and

Le Corbusier concerning Modernist urban planning, and finally explores

key ideas regarding the sacred in relation to contemporary architecture and

urban values.

WHAT DO we mean by the sacred? Many conventional interpretations

of the sacred implicitly reflect the approach of the historian of religion,

Mircea Eliade.1 Thus ‘the sacred’ is ‘wholly other’ than the mundane and

separated from everyday action and experience. Even if, for Eliade, the

manifestations of the sacred (hierophanies) take place in ordinary objects or

locations or a human incarnation of the divine, there is no continuity with the

ordinary. What is manifested is ‘something of a wholly different order,

a reality that does not belong to our world’.2 Importantly, he collapses

together ‘profane’ and ‘secular’—a distinction that needs to be reinstated and

I will return to this later. Eliade’s profane is all that lies outside what is

explicitly dedicated to the sacred, including sacred sites. This includes

everyday reality as a whole interpreted as existing in ‘a wholly desacralised

cosmos’ characteristic of Modernity.3

There are some difficulties with Eliade’s viewpoint. For one thing, it is

over-generalised and a-historical and fails to do justice to significant

differences in the way ‘the sacred’ is conceptualised in different religions

and even within the same religion. It also overlooks what might be called the

politics of the sacred—who defines what is sacred and who controls access to it.

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The point is that definitions of the sacred can be used as forms of control.

According to biblical scholar Dominic Crossan, Jesus rejects the exclusivity of

the permanent sacred site in Jerusalem’s Temple promoted by Jewish religious

authority as God’s ‘home’ and instead ‘goes about’ (a frequent verbal formula

in the Gospels) seeking ‘the lost sheep’ wherever they are. A hierarchy of place

(God is here rather than there) promotes a hierarchy of people. Established

sacred places tend to go along with established religious mediators who

dispensed established benefits. God becomes a patron, people become clients

and religious professionals become brokers.4 It is worth bearing in mind that

Eliade based his ideas on Rudolph Otto’s Das Heilige (The idea of the holy).

Otto, while fascinated by world religions, remained a Protestant theologian

heavily influenced by a conservative Lutheran (Two Kingdoms) rather than

sacramental-materialist world-view and a theology of God as awesome

mystery and power.5

I . THE CHALLENGE OF C IT I E S

My concern is to relate thinking about sacred place to cities, whose meaning

and future is one of the critical spiritual as well as economic and architectural

issues of our time. The city is where, for the majority of people, life is either

enhanced or diminished. Any attempt to address the complexity of the city

needs more than a mechanical approach. The challenge is how to relate city-

making to a vision of the human spirit and what enhances it.

Cities enable or disable ‘place identity’—a category of human experience

with a strong impact on how we situate ourselves within the world.6

In deconstructing Modernity’s belief in objective, ‘absolute’ place, post-

modern critiques assert that definition is power. The French Marxist philosopher

Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of place reminds us that systems of spatialisation are

historically conditioned—not merely physical arrangements of things but also

patterns of social action and routine, as well as historical conceptions of the

world. The meta-narratives of the people who hold power take over the

public places they control. The notion that place relates to issues of

empowerment and disempowerment forces us to think of multi-localities

(locations are different ‘places’ simultaneously) and multi-vocalities (different

voices are heard in each place).7

At a basic level, environment shapes the human spirit. Conversely, our

understanding of what enhances the human spirit shapes the environments we

construct. If cities are to reinforce a sense that human life is sacred rather

than merely an organic phenomenon, they must embrace all dimensions of

human existence—functional, ethical and spiritual. Essentially, we need

244 TRANSCENDENCE AND THE CITY

environments that offer access to the sacred (however we understand it)—or,

better, relate us to life itself as sacred.8

Are we building into cities what is precious to us? Cities have always been

powerful symbols of how we understand and construct community. Yet, the

Modernist planning and architecture that still dominates many Western cities

evokes neither the value of individual people nor focused community.

Rather, it speaks the language of size, money and power. Commercial

complexes like Canary Wharf tower in London’s Docklands too often exist in

brooding isolation rather than in relationship to anywhere else. Cities built in

the last fifty years frequently lack proper centres that express holistically the life

of a multifaceted community. Modernist ‘design rationalism’, which divides

cities into zones for living, working, leisure and shopping, fragments the rituals

of daily life.

In broader terms, this division into separate zones reflects a kind of flight of

the sacred from Western cities. There is no longer a centred, let alone

spiritually centred, meaning for the city. It becomes a commodity parcelled

into multiple activities and ways of organising time, matched by multiple

identities for the inhabitants.9 Overall, cellular urban design undermines a

unified sense of existence and bypasses shared places of encounter. Domestic

ghettos are increasingly protected against sterile public space that is treated

unimaginatively or abandoned to violence and vandalism.

I I . THE C ITY AND THE CHRI ST IAN ‘SACRED’

Without doubt, Western thinking about cities has been deeply influenced

over the last fifteen hundred years by Christian theology. Christianity has

sometimes been accused of anti-urban rhetoric. The American sociologist

Richard Sennett blames theology, in part, for the soulless nature of public

space. Sennett argues that Western culture suffers from a division between

inner and outer life. ‘It is a divide between subjective experience and worldly

experience, self and city’.10 This separation is based on an unacknowledged

fear of self-exposure, viewed as a threat. Sennett suggests that, apart from

spaces for consumer needs, city design has increasingly concentrated on

creating safe divisions between different groups of people. Public space thus

becomes bland as the main purpose is to facilitate movement across it rather

than encounters within it.11 For the city to recover, Sennett suggests, we need

to reaffirm the inherent value of the outer life.

For Sennett, St Augustine’s classic, City of God, is the foundational

expression of the triumph of an inner spiritual ‘world’ searching for

eternal fulfilment over the everyday city.12 What is most characteristic of

PHILIP SHELDRAKE 245

social places is diversity. Sennett argues, therefore, that by denying the

value of the outside, Christianity has underpinned Western doubts about

difference. He equates a Christian idea of ‘the sacred’ with sanctuary which

implies not merely special places but an image of protection and refuge from

what is other.

While I agree with much that Sennett says about city design, like many

others he misunderstands Augustine and how ‘the sacred’ functioned in the

premodern city.

I I I . AUGUST INE’S HUMAN C ITY

True, Augustine says at the start of his City of God (Book 1 Preface) that the

earthly city is marked by a ‘lust for domination’. However, this is essentially a

critique of late-Imperial Rome, his urban paradigm. Again, the true ‘city’ for

Augustine was the community of believers destined to become the City of

God. He was rightly suspicious of any attempt by even Christian Emperors to

suggest that their commonwealth was the perfect politics let alone the

Kingdom of God on earth.

Yet, Augustine scholars are clear that he does not deny the status of

the secular sphere or of the human city in particular. Here, we need to

distinguish between ‘secular’ and ‘profane’. In pre-Christian antiquity, the

latter implied what lay ‘outside the temple’—outside the domain of religious

cult and of what belonged to the gods. Under the impact of Christianity

with its high doctrine of the everyday, ‘the profane’ ceased to imply everyday

life and took on a narrower, negative connotation of whatever is opposed

to the ‘sacred’. By contrast, the ‘secular’ has more clearly Christian origins

and simply implies the everyday—the world of the saeculum, ‘this age’, space

and time, the here and now. We also need to distinguish carefully between

Augustine’s ‘earthly city’ (the civitas terrena, realm of sin) and the political

realities of society and city. The secular sphere, for example the city, is

a neutral ‘space’ where the spiritual reality of ‘the city of God’ and the

counter-spiritual reality of ‘the earthly city’ co-exist and contend, like

the wheat and tares, until the end of time. Augustine, while far from

indifferent to the moral foundations of places like the city, defended

a legitimate place for the secular realm within a Christian interpretation of

the world as the theatre of God’s action.13 Indeed, some commentators

suggest that the vocation of the human city—socially and architecturally—is

to strive to become a trace of the civitas Dei. According to this view,

while Augustine was neither city planner nor political theorist, he effec-

tively redeemed an urban culture in crisis by using the city as his image

of heaven.14


I V. MEDIEVAL URBAN V I S IONS

Around the twelfth century Western Europe underwent a major urban

revival. This had a serious impact on social and religious perspectives. One of

the most evident consequences of the new urbanism was the development of

the great ‘Gothic’ cathedrals. Cathedrals represented a theological as well as

geographical shift. Previously ‘the sacred’ was located primarily in rural

monastic communities. Not surprisingly the dominant image of paradise was a

recreation of a Garden of Eden. Now, images of ‘the sacred’ shifted from the

Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation, from the Garden of Eden to the

New Jerusalem.15

In the urban cathedral, paradise was symbolically evoked and also

brought down to earth.16 To enter the cathedral was to be transported into

a transcendent realm by the vast spaces, light flooding through the

dematerialization of walls with glass and by increasingly elaborate liturgies.

For Abbot Suger of St Denis in Paris, often credited with the birth of French

Gothic, church buildings had to be more impressive than all others in a city.

The architecture of the cathedrals acted as a microcosm of the cosmos and

sought to evoke a peaceable oneness between Creator and creation. This was

a utopian space, where an idealised heavenly harmony was portrayed in the

here and now. But it was idealised. The social symbolism of cathedrals was

ambiguous. While it portrayed divine-human unity it also manifested this-

worldly realities. The architectural portrayal of spiritual harmonia or divine order

was inevitably conservative as design and art reflected social hierarchies.17

Yet, at best, the cathedral promoted more than a two-dimensional, static,

urban ‘map’. It portrayed other dimensions—movement through space on

both vertical and horizontal planes and human transformation through time.

Cathedrals were repositories for the cumulative memory and constantly

renewed aspirations of the community. Even today, to enter such a building

is to engage with centuries of human pain, achievements, hopes and ideals.

This ‘memory palace’ is a constant reminder that in itself remembering is vital

to a healthy sense of identity. In his outline of an urban aesthetic, the

American philosopher Arnold Berleant suggests that the cathedral acted as a

guide to an ‘urban ecology’ that helped to transform a city into a place

where human life was continually enlarged.18 Such an urban icon spoke of

the ‘condition of the world’ and offered communion with something deeper

than ordered public life.

V. D I SPERS ING THE SACRED?

While all this may be true, it is not the whole story. The use of Christian

buildings for sacred rituals must be placed in a wider context. There are


alternative voices that speak compellingly of the dispersal rather than the

protection of the sacred beyond the boundaries of overtly religious buildings.

One is Albert Rouet, Bishop of Poitiers who, in a striking essay on art,

architecture and liturgy, comments, ‘Sacred space is that of God’s nomads.

This itinerancy is an important characteristic of those who seek God, of those

who are members of the People of God.’19 Without ignoring the spiritual

and theological symbolism of church buildings or denying their power to

shape spiritual experience, Rouet notes that, beginning with an empty tomb,

for Christians the ‘sacred’ is embodied in people and their everyday existence

as much as in fixed sacred sites. For this reason, church buildings make

spiritual–theological sense ultimately in relation to the human community

and the quality of sacred life that they encapsulate and enable. For this

reason, sacred space also denies itself in a way. Christianity is a religion without

spatial limits.20

V I . THE C ITY AS SACRED LANDSCAPE

Even premodern notions of ‘the sacred’ were not restricted to ritual sites

such as cathedrals. This is something Sennett overlooks. There was a clear

sense that the city embraced a wider ‘sacred landscape of the streets’. Streets

in predominantly Catholic countries frequently retain rich collections of

street shrines. So, for example, those in the citta vecchia of Bari, ranging in age

from the twelfth-century to the present, have been the subject of scholarly

research.21

The sense that the city as a whole was a sacred landscape was reinforced

by processions and blessings. In medieval cities, the Christian Eucharist was

a public drama, not only in the many churches but also the feast-day pageants,

mystery plays and street processions, for example, on the feast of Corpus

Christi. Processions, before Lent and on Rogation Days or ceremonies to

mark out the boundaries of each parish, together symbolised a purification of

the city from the spirit of evil.22 Medieval citizens sometimes made the

heavenly Jerusalem (Book of Revelation Chapter 21) a model for urban

planning. Thus, the Statutes of Florence of 1339 emphasised the existence of

the sacred number of twelve gates even though the city had by then extended

to fifteen gates.23

Later in the Middle Ages, the development of the great Italian piazzas owed

much to the new mendicant orders such as Franciscans and Dominicans whose

preaching churches opened onto large spaces where crowds gathered to

listen to popular preachers (for example, San Marco, Santa Maria Novella,

Santa Croce or Santissima Annunziata in Florence). Just as the colonnades

of ancient Rome gave birth to the monastic cloister, so in the new laicised,


city spirituality of the later Middle Ages, the monastic cloister in turn moved

into the city to give birth to the colonnaded piazza. This offered a vision

of the city, metaphorically (it engendered a concept of public space for

intermingling) and practically (it opened up new urban vistas that enhanced

and safeguarded the panorama of cities).

Italy also defended the ideal that city life, with citizens living in concord,

was as much a way to God as monastic life. A genre of poetry, the laudes

civitatis, articulated a spiritual ideal of civic life. They depict the human city as

a place where, like the Heavenly City, diverse people are able to live together

in peace. The laudes further portrayed cities as renowned for the quality of

communal life in which every citizen found a particular role in building up the

whole. The city itself was idealised as sacred with a number of key spiritual

qualities. Thus a Milanese hymn praised the inhabitants because they fulfilled

all the requirements of the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 25 that the hungry

would be fed, strangers welcomed, the naked clothed.24

Despite the fact that the Reformation was an urban phenomenon, a ‘high’

view of cities dissolved in large parts of Europe under its impact. To some

extent Sennett’s ‘Protestant ethic of space’ reflected a suspicion of the material

world and a tendency towards iconoclasm. The Protestant Reformation

affirmed the unbridgeable gulf between the holiness of God and the world of

sinful creatures. It also relocated ‘the sacred’ to the community of believers and

downgraded physical mediations of God’s presence. Over time ‘the sacred’

retreated from public places (which became increasingly profane) into the

purified spaces of religious buildings and into the private realm. This

opposition between sacred and everyday spheres of human life was solidified

during the Enlightenment.

V I I . DE CERTEAU, LE CORBUS IER AND THE MODERN C ITY

The modern city is a long way from the compact medieval city whose

horizons remained local. In reflecting on contemporary urban realities, the

writings of the French Jesuit priest, cultural theorist, historian of spirituality

and social scientist Michel de Certeau (1925–86) are especially provocative.25

In part de Certeau’s spiritual preoccupations underpinned his concern to

explore the ‘practice of everyday life’ (the title of two of his books) against

totalising urban theories, to prioritise people over top-down planning,

to defend history against a rationalist obliteration of the past. In his essay for

architects, ‘Ghosts in the city’, it seems probable that one of de Certeau’s

targets was Le Corbusier who had a powerful influence on European urban

planning during the mid-twentieth century. Le Corbusier stood for two

aspects of Modernist planning that de Certeau disliked: a tendency to erase the


past and to subordinate the realities of people’s lives to abstract concepts of

‘space’. Le Corbusier espoused a matter-spirit dualism influenced by the

philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. This created a division between public and

private life.26 For Le Corbusier, knowledge and value were found in the

inner, individual life. The outer, public, world was of dubious worth.

Consequently, his city schemes made it difficult for people to congregate

casually because uncontrolled socialising was a distraction. Not surprisingly,

Le Corbusier disliked participatory politics. He was, nevertheless, highly

influential in Modernist planning, especially its emphasis on rationality and

efficiency and tendency to create ‘soulless’ public spaces.27

In contrast, de Certeau opposed Modernist ‘restoration’, which generated

upmarket apartments and shopping malls and displaced existing communities

to outer areas, where the 1960s low cost housing projects created new

instruments of alienation. ‘Restoration’ in this sense implied for de Certeau

a separation of planning from human lives. He was a prophet of the ‘ineffable

something’ that a poetics of everyday life brings to a city. For de Certeau,

a city is a richly textured fabric woven by its users—their ways of proceeding,

their walking, their chance encounters, the stories they tell, the dreams

they nurture.

There was both a political and a spiritual underpinning to de Certeau’s

pleadings with architects and planners.28 His defence of provisionality and

objection to utopian visions accords with his implicitly Augustinian view

that a harmonious arrangement of human environments implies more than

rational order. Part of the ‘aesthetics’ of a healthy city is precisely the way

it facilitates the transcendence of static order. The kinds of space theories

that planners impose on cities to ‘make sense’ of them are frequently

totalitarian. In his essay, ‘Walking in the City’, de Certeau expressed one of his

favourite themes, that of ‘resistance’ to systems that leave no room for

otherness.29 The ‘weak’, in this case those who actually live in the city

rather than plan it, find ways to make space for themselves and to express their

self-determination.

Le Corbusier’s emphasis on the ‘radiant city’, with glass towers reaching to

the sky, appealed to a transcendent horizon where the city itself becomes the

Temple. Le Corbusier’s city had no churches because all human desires could

be realised in this environment. In this spirit, Le Corbusier called the

skyscrapers of Manhattan ‘new white cathedrals’. They engendered a kind of

euphoria and not only embodied transcendence in their sublime height but

offered a ‘total vision’ symbolised by panoramic vistas.

In ‘Walking in the City’ De Certeau offers a striking contrast. Standing

on top of the World Trade Center, he writes of the almost erotic pleasure

and temptation of ‘seeing the whole’, of looking down upon the city

and of totalising it. There we are (or were) lifted out of Manhattan’s


grasp—becoming voyeurs not walkers. We then ‘read’ the city as a simple text.

But this is really an illusion. As de Certeau puts it, ‘The fiction of this kind

of knowledge is related to a lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more’.30

De Certeau compares this way of seeing to the aloofness of the urban planner.

Meanwhile, the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’. For

de Certeau, what he called ‘the Concept-city’ of Modernism was decaying.

What outlives this decay are ‘the microbe-like, singular and plural practices

which an urbanistic system was supposed to control or suppress’.31 These

everyday practices by ordinary people are what make the city lived space as

opposed to mere concept-space. Such urban practices defy differentiation,

classification and the imposition of social hierarchies.

This dimension of the city is what de Certeau called the ‘noise’—the

‘difference’ that is a city’s life blood without which it becomes an empty shell.

That is why he believed the role of indeterminacy or ‘casual time’ was so

important. ‘Thus, to eliminate the unforeseen or expel it from calculations as

an illegitimate accident and an obstacle to rationality is to interdict the

possibility of a living and ‘‘mythical’’ practice of the city.’32

De Certeau’s attacks on Modernist planning for destroying history were

not mere nostalgia. On the contrary, de Certeau, a major historiographer

who critiqued Modernism’s a-historical tendencies, strongly emphasised

the power of narrative to shape environments and to transform them. Indeed,

in terms of everyday life, it is story as much as architecture or planning

that enables people to use the city as a medium for creative living.33 Stories

take ownership of spaces, define boundaries and create bridges between

individuals. For de Certeau, making space for narrative is a vital factor

in creating the city as community rather than an agglomeration of buildings

and spaces.34 His understanding of narrative embraced the history of ‘place’

because without respecting the past a city would become dysfunctional

and dangerous.

De Certeau rejected the urban utopias of people like Le Corbusier partly

because they reduced the ‘sacred’ or ‘transcendence’ to abstractions about

‘space’ and ‘light’ but most of all because they overestimated the possibility of

ultimate fulfilment engineered purely by design. De Certeau’s rejection of

definitive urban utopias and his espousal of a fluid, mobile city for ever ‘on the

way’ in the life and practices of its citizens, parallels in many ways Augustine’s

City on pilgrimage towards the Kingdom of God. It is not unreasonable to see

in de Certeau a mixture of an Augustinian theology (inherited from his

theological mentor Henri de Lubac), suspicious of any notion of the ultimate

fulfilment of human desire within time and space, and his Left-wing political

concern to transgress all ‘programmed and regulated operations in the city’.35

Hence his opposition to all forms of secularised ‘salvation’ especially when

realised through the social engineering of regulated city planning.


V I I I . C ITY-MAK ING AND THE SACRED

The premodern city underlined the importance of memory, a spirituality of

city life focussed on ‘the common good’ and a sense of ‘the sacred’. While it

would be inappropriate to hark back to premodern visions, I believe it is vital

to recover a sense that a city can somehow be ‘sacred’ to its inhabitants.

One insight of Eliade is still helpful: ‘the sacred’ and its opposite pole, ‘the

profane’, are actually two contrasting ways of viewing the world and living

in it.36 A Christian way of viewing the world suggests that no part of the

world is inherently profane although it may be profaned by human actions.

‘The sacred’ is materialised in a variety of ways, of which built environments

are one example. Sociological evidence in Western Europe suggests that the

great religious buildings, such as cathedrals, continue to play a significant role

in embodying ‘the sacred’ even in apparently secular societies.37 However, in

radically plural Western cities, ‘the sacred’ necessarily involves more than

traditional religious buildings.

What difference does the idea of ‘the sacred’ make to an ethics of urban

design? It encapsulates a vision of ultimate value in human existence—an

‘interpreted world’, if you like. This moves ethics beyond a limited utilitarian

understanding of ‘the moral life’ towards a notion of virtue as both the training

of desire and as wisdom. One might add that ‘the sacred’, by introducing

a critical note of otherness (the human other or divine other), grounds

what is important about existence in something greater than the enhancement

of the self. We need urban designs that, like the medieval cathedral,

speak to us of ‘the condition of the world’, liberate us from a sense of

fundamental estrangement and counteract ‘a nihilistic and pessimistic vision of

the world’.38 ‘The sacred’ also has resonances of reverence and awe. These may

express a sense of God or a more diffuse sense of the numinous. ‘Reverence’

must also, surely, refer to a reverence for environment, for other people

and for life itself and ‘awe’ is not the same as being oppressed by the sheer

size of buildings.

It is important to reflect on what makes buildings or spaces ‘awesome’ in a

constructive sense. This implies more than design and may also reflect motive

and purpose. Are ‘reverence’ and ‘awe’ more likely in relation to buildings and

spaces that consciously address, grant access to and reinforce the value of

people at large rather than merely protect economic or social elites? In this

regard, it is interesting to reflect on contemporary debates about ‘iconic

buildings’.39 People’s reactions to this are ambivalent. On the positive side,

thoughtful architects suggest that, apart from being impressive and highly

visible, iconic structures may become collective symbols that articulate the

very nature of a place. Laurie Peake even sees such structures as embodying a

kind of ascetic self-denial. ‘This may be seen as their principle role, a selfless


denial of their own significance for the betterment of their context’.40 They

are a ‘symbol of aspiration, rising above the dreary mediocrity of buildings

measured by profit margins and speed of construction’ and they function as a

landmark, ‘giving us security on the horizon in a fast moving world’.41

However, there are also serious questions. Is the purpose of iconic buildings

really to shock us as a reflection of a fundamentally contemptuous culture?

Because many modern icons are often commercial (for example, Foster’s Swiss

Re-building) their relatively banal purposes have taken over the expressive

role from more elevated or sacred tasks. As Jencks asks, if religion, politics or

other meta-narratives are no longer central, are we left simply with ourselves in

a culture where clothing, money and celebrity become the new ‘universals’ to

be believed in?

As we confront urban futures in the twenty-first century, one key question

is ‘what are cities for?’ They no longer have strictly practical roles as defence

against attack or as the necessary focus for economic systems. If cities are

to have meaning rather than merely an irreversible existence, this will

increasingly be to fulfil the wider requirements of human life. There needs to

be greater reflection on the civilising possibilities of cities and the opportunity

they offer for social humanisation beyond other social aggregations. Cities

have a unique capacity to focus a range of physical, intellectual and creative

energies. They create new sets of relationships simply because of their

unparalleled ability to combine differences of age, ethnicity, culture, gender

and religion. Their large size and diversity of spaces can also balance encounter

and anonymity.

The good city is before everything a humane city. The humane city offers

space for individuality to be balanced with commonality. It enables human

aspirations to be productive rather than repressed or diminished into self-

indulgence. It facilitates a proper connection to the natural world so that

habitat is integrated with people in a holistic sense of ‘environment’. If cities

are to do more than evoke a sense of reluctant inevitability, we must replace

alienation, isolation, crime, congestion and pollution by community,

participation, energy, aesthetics and joy.

The influential British architect Richard Rogers, while open to the

criticism of being over-utopian, has been a proponent of person-centred

architecture and planning. What is interesting is his concept of ‘open-minded

space’ which has ethical and spiritual resonances. This multi-functional space

enables a variety of uses in which as many people as possible become

participants. Rogers contrasts this with the dominance of ‘single-minded’

space with a function predetermined by planners and architects and prioritising

efficiency. Historically, urban cultures have ‘worked’ only when they were

participatory, genuinely affirmative of people and expressive of shared

human values. Participation demands physical expression in architecture and


planning and for this the concept of ‘open-minded space’ is indispensable.

‘Open-minded’ space needs to be accessible physically, ‘intellectually’ and

spiritually in the sense that, in its design, it evokes freedom and inclusivity

rather than the opposite.

In his vision for future cities, Rogers highlights principles that are spiritual

as much as functional. A city needs to be just (accessible to all and

participative), beautiful (an aesthetic that uplifts the spirit), creative

(stimulating the full potential of all citizens and able to respond easily

to change), ecological (where landscape and human action are integrated),

‘of easy contact’ (where communication is facilitated and public spaces are

communitarian), polycentric (integrating neighbourhoods and maximising

proximity) and finally diverse, expressing the pluralism and multi-culturalism

of the contemporary city.42

These ethical–spiritual values must be supplemented by others that Rogers

overlooks—such as memory, aspiration or desire and a sense of the sacred.

These find a place in the international planning guru, Leonie Sandercock’s

‘planning imagination’ for the twenty-first century which addresses questions

of value and meaning—the building blocks of an ethical–spiritual approach to

city-making. Her virtues are that she counters the destructive aspects of

Modernist planning agendas and moves beyond the purely physical by

espousing a person-centred planning imagination. While a secular humanist,

more recently Sandercock has expressed the wish to discover a common

spiritual vocabulary that is capable of embracing classic religious values such as

‘the sacred’, ‘faith’ and ‘narratives of redemption’.43 However, her expositions

of the ‘city of desire’ and ‘city of spirit’ are not fully worked out. The question

remains whether her spiritual vision will be robust enough to confront the

tough realities of power dominance and economic exclusion.

A ‘city of spirit’ implies a different way of knowing the city. It involves

what I call ‘spiritual knowledge’ and the creation of spaces that facilitate it.

This comes close to Aristotle’s third kind of knowledge. After epistome

(scientific knowledge) and techne (application of theory) there is phronesis—

‘judgment’ or ‘practical wisdom’. While practical, phronesis is knowledge born

of intuition, imagination, emotional engagement and desire. Interestingly,

Aristotle saw phronesis as applicable especially to civic life. Plato, in contrast,

believed that effective living demanded that the intellect be protected from

the emotional, sensuous and material. Le Corbusier’s urbanism and much

Modernist planning is essentially Platonist—rationalist and abstract rather than

engaged with everyday life. In contrast, Aristotle’s phronesis suggests that

‘spiritual knowing’ of the kind needed to build civic life actually happens in

and through material existence. Certainly, for a city to nurture this kind

of integrating knowledge it means constructing places for ‘thinking time’,

silence and solitude. However, this implies not just places of withdrawal


(a church or an art museum). It also suggests a wider need for spaces and

buildings that encourage and deepen attentiveness, a contemplative awareness

of the sacredness of the ordinary embedded in the indeterminacy and

messiness of everyday life in the city.

Finally, the quest for the good city involves a sense of the ‘common good’.

The size and pluralism of today’s cities make a sense of commonality more

difficult than in former times. Can people of different backgrounds identify

aspects of the ‘good life’ that they agree are desirable? Some people fear an

enforced submerging of ‘otherness’ into the ‘ethos’ of a dominant group.

Tolerance of irreconcilable difference is the best we should work for.

However, others argue that we can do better.

The American social ethicist, David Hollenbach, offers a challenging

exposition of the continued validity of seeking to negotiate ‘the common

good’ in contexts of urban diversity. What matters is commitment to a never

completed process of making meaning and negotiating a common vocabulary

rather than the immediate prospect of success.

This common pursuit of a shared vision of the good life can be called intellectual

solidarity . . . for it calls for serious thinking by citizens about what their distinctiveunderstandings of the good imply for a society made up of people with

many different traditions. It is a form of solidarity, because it can only occur in an

active dialogue of mutual listening and speaking across the boundaries of religion

and culture. Indeed, dialogue that seeks to understand those with different

visions of the good life is already a form of solidarity even when disagreement

continues to exist.44

IX . CONCLUS ION: THE SACRED AND AN ETH ICS OF C ITY-MAK ING

The value of a sense of ‘the sacred’ is its capacity to promote the transcendence

of a protected self and therefore self-restraint. However, the problem with

ethics is its heavy prescriptive overtones. Despite this, in contemporary city-

making there is a serious need for planners and architects to recover a sense

that their task is to enhance people’s lives. What is the purpose, beyond mere

function, of building or planning? In what sense does it help or hinder the

‘human good’? This demands a vision and moral ambition which affirms that

‘building well’ goes beyond creating efficient systems, good engineering and

pleasing aesthetics.45 The problem has been that architecture has often

appeared concerned solely with form or with the promotion of pure design.

Yet, I strongly resist a divorce between ethics and aesthetics. We need to

work out the connections between aesthetics and human well-being.

We need to recover a sense that architecture and design relate to visions

of life in a number of ways. They contribute to our constructions of reality.


They influence our experience of the spiritual. They help us to perceive

pathways to the sacred.

Clearly we need more than an abstract notion of beauty that is incapable of

producing a measure of what a ‘good life’ is. It is interesting to recall beauty in

the aesthetics of Augustine. Here, ‘beauty’ is linked to an ability to evoke

wonder and to grant access to ‘the sacred’. Beauty reflects harmonia, the ‘fitting

order’ established by God. In contemporary language this might be

reconceived in terms of the human spirit in harmony with itself, with

others and with broader nature. Thus, the modern preoccupation with urban

‘sustainability’ is not a purely economic consideration but is an expression of

a fundamental unity of human existence with the rest of nature.

At the same time, being people of vision does not mean that architects or

planners should exercise unquestioned power or dispense moral or spiritual

wisdom ‘from above’. Architects and planners will be genuinely ethical and

spiritual forces in city-making, when they leave behind the temptation to

become Olympian social engineers and empower citizens in their quest to

articulate for themselves a common ethos that engages not only with sacred

spaces in the city but with the sacredness of human life as a whole.

Department of Theology and Religion, Abbey House,

Palace Green, Durham, DH1 3RS

[email protected]

REFERENCES

1 See, M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane:

The Nature of Religion (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987),

Introduction.2 Eliade, p. 11.3 Eliade, p. 13.4 J. D. Crossan, ‘Jesus and the Kingdom:

Itinerants and householders in Earliest

Christianity’ in Marcus Borg (ed.) Jesus at

Æ�� (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998),

pp. 21–53.5 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1958 [1917]).6 For reflection on place, see

P. Sheldrake, Spaces for the sacred: Place,

memory and identity (London: SCM

Press/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 2001); Gaston Bachelard,

The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press,

1994); Edward S. Casey, ‘How to get from

space to place in a fairly short stretch

of time: Phenomenological prolegomena’

in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds)

Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School

of American Research Press, 1996);

J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A

Philosophical Topography (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999).7 See H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).8 See comments by architect Robert

Mugerauer in Interpretations on Behalf of


Place: Environmental Displacements and

Alternative Responses (New York: State

University of New York Press, 1994),

especially CH. 10.9 See J. Matthew Ashley, Interruptions:

Mysticism, Politics and Theology in the Work

of Johann Baptist Metz (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1998),

pp. 10–12.10 R. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The

Design and Social Life of Cities (London:

Faber & Faber, 1993), p. xii.11 Sennett, pp. xii–xiii.12 Sennett, pp. 6–10.13 For an updated analysis of ‘the secular

realm’ in Augustine, see R. A. Markus,

Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).14 D. Mayernik, Timeless Cities: An Architect’s

Reflections on Renaissance Italy (Boulder

CO: Westview Press, 2003), pp. 5–13.15 See C. McDannell and B. Lang, Heaven, A

History (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1988), pp. 70–80.16 See P. Sheldrake, ‘Reading cathedrals as

spiritual texts’, Studies in Spirituality 11

(2001), 187–204.17 B. Bedos-Rozak, ‘Form as social process’

in V. Chieffo Raguin, K. Brush and

P. Draper (eds) Artistic Integration in Gothic

Buildings (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1995), pp. 243–44.18 See A. Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1992), p. 62.19 A. Rouet, Liturgy and the Arts (College-

ville: The Liturgical Press, 1997), p. 95.20 Rouet, p. 105.21 See N. Cortone and N. Lavermicocca,

Santi di strada: Le edicole religiose della citta

vecchia di Bari, 5 Vols, (Bari: Edizione BA

Graphis, 2001–03).22 See P. Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More

(London: Random House, 1999), p. 111.23 C.Frugoni, A Distant City: Images of

Urban Experience in the Medieval World

(Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1991), p. 27.

24 See P. Raedts, ‘The medieval city as a holy

place’ in C. Caspers and M. Schneiders

(eds) Omnes Circumadstantes: Contributions

towards a History of the Role of the People in

the Liturgy (Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschap-

pij J.H. Kok, 1990), pp. 144–54.25 Michel de Certeau’s thinking about cities

is found in ‘Walking in the city’ and

‘Spatial stories’ in The Practice of Everyday

Life (ET Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1988); Part 1: Living, especially

‘Ghosts in the city’, in The Practice of

Everyday Life, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1998); ‘The

imaginary of the city’ and isolated com-

ments in Culture in the Plural, (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2001).26 For criticisms of the Cartesian influences on

Le Corbusier, see e.g. W. A. Davis, Inward-

ness and Existence (University of Wisconsin

Press, 1989) and also F. Kerr, Theology after

Wittgenstein (London: SPCK, 1997), CH. 1:

‘The Modern Philosophy of the Self.’27 For a study of Le Corbusier’s theories of

self and society see S. Richards, Le

Corbusier and the Concept of the Self

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).28 De Certeau, ‘Ghosts in the City’.29 De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’,

pp. 91–110.30 De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’ p. 92.31 De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, p. 96.32 De Certeau, ‘Indeterminate’ in The Practice

of Everyday Life, p. 203.33 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,

p. 115.34 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,

pp. 122–30.35 De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, p. 95.36 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 14.37 See G. Davie, Religion in Modern Europe:

A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), CH. 9.38 M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

(New York: Harper & Row, 1957),

p. 239.39 See for example, L. Peake, ‘Smash-

ing Icons’ in Will Alsop’s SuperCity


(Manchester: Urbis, 2005), pp. 39–49 and

C. Jencks, ‘The iconic building is here to

stay’ in City 10/1, April 2006, pp. 3–20.40 Peake, p. 41.41 Peake, p. 49.42 R. Rogers, Cities for a Small Planet

(London: Faber & Faber, 1997), especially

pp. 167–68.43 See L. Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel

Cities in the Æ"st Century (London/

New York: Continuum, 2003).

44 D. Hollenbach, The Common Good

and Christian Ethics (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002),

pp. 137–38.45 On architectural ethics, see K. Harries,

The Ethical Function of Architecture

(Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1998)

and T. Spector, The Ethical Architect:

The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice

(New York: Princeton Architectural

Press, 2001).


placing the sacred, transcendence and the city

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