ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the task of exploring the widespread and many-formed animus toward the public realm by looking at words and visual images, that is, by looking at assaults of a representational character. It focuses on its concrete embodiment in the built environment. To speak of the antiurbanism theme in Anglo-American culture is not to suggest that no countercurrents exist. Abraham Cowley's epigram tells us why some scholars have traced the Western tradition of urban animus to the first book of the Old Testament. The chapter discusses the hypothesis that it judge the public realm as harshly as people do at least partly as a consequence of viewing it through the moral lens—that is, with the moral standards—of the parochial and private realms, especially the latter. It considers a number of the direct and indirect assaults that have been launched against it during the last several hundred years.
