ABSTRACT
As Kevin Lynch has pointed out, to study the city is not always a matter of simple observation. “We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself,” Lynch writes, “but the city as being perceived by its inhabitants.”1 Writers are among the most perspicacious of urbanites, and so their observations of the city will be of especial interest. In western letters, literary representations of city life are haunted by biblical figures. In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, Deutero-Isaiah envisions the time when the Israelites will return from exile in Babylon to a restored Zion, “an exalted city, one which resembled the fabled garden of Eden…a holy city which would fulfill its original destiny as the dwelling place of Yahweh and the center of religious truth.”2 In an analogous way, the first urban Christians look forward to the time that the urbs Romana will be transformed into “the New Jerusalem, that comes down from heaven to earth.”3 In western literature, Saint Augustine’s City of God most fully develops this tension between the threat of Babylon and the promise of a New Jerusalem into “a marvellous paradox” of civilized alienation.4 For Augustine, we are alien citizens because
the earthly city, if dominated by Satanic self-love, is also the place wherein the city of God is at work recruiting its citizens-elect, transforming the children of Cain into fellow travellers with Abel: men and women who pray for the peace of Babylon, but who live there only in body, being in heart and mind pilgrims en route to the heavenly Jerusalem.5
