The New Jerusalem

A young man leaving his village in west Java for the bustle und hustle of Jakarta, a woman giving birth in the Lagos slum of Makoko, a farmer moving his family into one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas: No one will have registered the exact event and welcomed the new city dweller with a bunch of flowers. Yet it marked the beginning of a new era in the history of humankind. For the first time ever, the urban population of the earth has outnumbered the rural.

The dream of mankind: to live in a city. From the Biblical Jericho (10 000 BC) to the Disney-built town of Celebration, Florida (1996 AD), man has longed for a city of “pure gold, like clear glass”, whose “brilliance [is] like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper.” Two thousand years ago, John of Patmos provided city planners and architects with a blueprint for man’s ideal city. It’s called the New Jerusalem.

In the Book of Revelation, also know as the Apocalypse, an angel takes John “in the Spirit” to a vantage point on “a great and high mountain” to see the New Jerusalem descend. Out of heaven it comes: walled-in, golden, glittering, eternal.

The New Jerusalem retains many features of the Garden of Eden: rivers, a square, a wall, and the tree of life. Yet, it is an enormous city, with twelve gates, streets made of gold and a square surrounded by a wall of jasper. The river of the water of life flows down the middle of the great street and the tree of life bears fruit every month. The New Jerusalem has no temple and no sin. Night will no longer fall, and the inhabitants of the city will “need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light.” (Revelation 22:5) John of Patmos had a vision. The Puritans, who left England in the 17th century for the New World, had a goal: to create the millennial kingdom, a truly righteous nation in the New Jerusalem of New England. If the end of the world is near – as the Puritans interpreted English politics in the early 17th century - then hope rests with those who seek their own New Jerusalem.

The Puritan preacher John Winthrop, who would become the first Governor of Massachusetts, in true apocalyptic spirit wanted to build “a city upon a hill”. However, ask a resident of New York City for New Jerusalem today, he or she will point across the Hudson River towards New Jersey and joke about stench, gangsters and a lack of trees – as if “New Joisey” (that’s how it’s supposed to be pronounced) was paved over from end to end like one giant city.

For millennia, man may have taken comfort in resting in green pastures and wandering by still waters (Psalm 23), experi­encing a precious oneness with Nature, yet it is cities, which promise a better life: freedom, wealth, opportunity and security. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the ideal of the New Jerusalem has grabbed man’s imagination right into the 20th century, when gigantic urbanisation projects tried to put the tenets of politics and art into bricks and mortar, erecting metropolises of steel and glass where there used to be nothing before.

Soaring towards heaven …

It was political radicals of the Left, like the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (100 years old and still going strong) and the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, who were given the chance to build their own versions of a New Jerusalem. In the 1950s, Niemeyer designed the new Brazilian capital of Brasilia with pencil and paper, a few years later Doxiadis sketched Pakistan’s new centre, Islamabad, on a drawing board.

These minutely planned places separate out the functions of a city. Zones were created for commerce, residential and industrial use, divided by enormous boulevards for an age when the car was the undisputed king. In theory and practice, these designs proved grand. However, no matter how hard these architects have tried to give their lofty modernist principles an aesthetically pleasing concrete (!) materiality, the visionaries forgot one vital thing: quarters for paupers.

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