In City of Refuge, Michael Lewis examines the history of modern utopian city planning in Europe and America. The title derives from its primary focus on planned religious communities intended as sanctuaries for Protestant separatists, but the book ranges widely, exploring the interrelationship between these havens of spiritual idealism and more secular experiments in town planning, such as the rebuilding of London after the great fire of 1666, and the foundation of Philadelphia; Savannah, Georgia; Robert Owen’s visionary, nineteenth-century industrial commune at New Harmony; and the Philanstère of Charles Fourier.
Journeying from Renaissance schemes inspired by the works of the Roman military engineer Vitruvius and Florentine scholar Leon Batista Alberti, Lewis examines the transformation of the Vitruvian circular city plan, as interpreted by fifteenth-century Italian humanists, to the square, as based upon biblical descriptions of the heavenly Jerusalem. The author examines sources and influences as disparate as Albrecht Dürer’s famous scheme for an ideal city of 1527; the biblical roots of Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon’s luxurious reconstruction of the mobile encampment of the twelve tribes of the Israelites (ca. 1647), as described in the book of Numbers; the Roman castrum; and the first published map of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, published in Nuremberg in 1524.
The first city of refuge, Freudenstadt (1598–99), founded by Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, to shelter Protestant refugees fleeing the Counter-Reformation in Austria, was designed as a four-square bastion by the German architect Heinrich Schickhardt, a prolific designer familiar with earlier ideal Italian cities, including the fortress town of Palmanova. Schickhardt’s designs for Freudenstadt in turn influenced Johann Valentin Andreae’s scheme for his city of Christianopolis of 1619, a Protestant reinterpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia. During the middle of the eighteenth-century, Count Nicholaus Zinzendorf founded the first Moravian communities in Europe at Herrnhut and Hernhaag. These villages would serve as models for Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania and Georgia. While laden with rich spiritual meaning, the form of these new towns also exhibited Renaissance ideals of symmetry, proportion, and regularity. This classical organization of space lent itself well to the ordering of the new religious communities for which they were planned, physically reinforcing radical Protestant theological tenets concerning the equality of individuals, communal ownership of property, and the establishment of the church as the central authority within society.
In addition to Moravians, other dissenters such as the Shakers, who likewise sought refuge in America, transplanted many of these ideas to new soil. Lewis pays particular attention to the Harmonists, who, following the eccentric yet charismatic lead of George Rapp, founded and built the three religious communes of Harmony, New Harmony, and Economy in Pennsylvania and Indiana during the early nineteenth-century. The Harmonists attracted the attention of Frederick Engels, who initially chronicled their communal experiments, but ultimately turned his attention to Robert Dale Owens’s attempt to transform New Harmony from a celibate religious enclave into a secular, yet still communal, industrial village.
On a macro scale, Lewis documents the surprisingly fluid transmission of ideas and forms across religious, political, and economic boundaries, from Catholics, to radical Protestants, to secular nineteenth-century industrialists. At the same time, the author’s attention to details of architectural forms and town plans, and the complex interrelationships—both academic and personal—between theologians, charismatic and radical religious leaders, alchemists, and scholars, is both impressive and fascinating. This book is exhaustively researched and the author reveals a superb grasp of the complex theological and philosophical propositions that directly and indirectly underlay the adaption of these plans. Lewis treats us to not only a multifaceted history of the ideal city from fifteenth-century Italy to nineteenth century America, but has fashioned a thoroughly enjoyable and often-entertaining journey along the way. The book is exceptionally well written, and sumptuously illustrated with many color images—although at times the reader might wish for somewhat larger reproductions. Given the current constraints facing the publishing world, however, one cannot quibble with this relatively minor shortcoming. As an important contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the modern landscape, City of Refuge should be of interest to scholars of the history of architecture and city planning, as well those involved in religious, cultural, and intellectual studies.
