“Co-Agent of the Millennium”: City Planning and Christian Eschatology in the North American City, 1890–1920

Abstract

Urban geography has overlooked the influence of eschatology in the conception and production of modern cities. City planning at the turn of the twentieth century imbibed at the plentiful well of liberal evangelical theology and its belief in a postmillennial advent of the “Kingdom of God on Earth.” Foretold in scripture, this “kingdom” was in fact a heavenly city brought down to earth, a divine corollary to social progress and scientific ingenuity. Unsurprisingly, postmillennialism informed much of the progressivism of reformers and city planners, city planning a social gospel in its own right and best qualified to reconcile the geography of the city with the moral, physical, and spiritual life of city people. Thus, what we call professional postmillennialism and attribute to the efforts of city planners waxed secular: Professional planners produced not the hoped-for “New Jerusalem” but the much maligned twentieth-century city. To demonstrate our thesis we investigate two foundational city planners: Charles Zueblin and John Nolen, the former a respected planning theorist and the latter a prolific and celebrated practitioner, and disclose both as discursively postmillennial.

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