Alex Krieger

Harvard Book Store welcomes leading urban planner and scholar ALEX KRIEGER for a discussion of his new book, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.

About City on a Hill

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.

Praise for City on a Hill

“Alex Krieger offers a lively and highly readable account of how, from the colonial era onward, Americans’ utopian dreams have shaped our cities and can today provide hope for a more just, sustainable, and beautiful future. It is a most welcome view of a persistent strain of aspiration and optimism in our national life.” ―Drew Faust, President Emerita, Harvard University

“In City on a Hill, Krieger brilliantly demolishes the myth that the ideals of America are somehow rooted in the countryside and disconnected from our cities. He has written not just a history of American urbanism but a history of our attitudes toward cities, reminding us how profoundly our cities, for all their failings, reflect our aspirations. It is a story he tells with such richness and nuance that this book becomes, for all intents and purposes, a history of America itself.”
―Paul Goldberger, architecture critic and author of Ballpark: Baseball in the American City

“Panoramic, original, and insightful, City on a Hill is a genuine achievement, and reflects and embodies Krieger’s decades-long involvement both with urban design and American urban history. This book deserves to be the most widely read comprehensive history of the American city.” ―Robert Fishman, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan