Public Religion and the Urban Environment

Constructing a River Town

Richard Bohannon

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781472534651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441149336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

'Nature' and the 'city' have most often functioned as opposites within Western culture, a dichotomy that has been reinforced (and sometimes challenged) by religious images. Bohannon argues here that cities and natural environments, however, are both connected and continually affected by one another. He shows how such connections become overt during natural disasters, which disrupt the narratives people use to make sense of the world,including especially religious narratives, and make them more visible. This book offers both a theoretical exploration of the intersection of the city, nature, and religion, as well as a sociological analysis of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, ND, USA. This case study shows how religious factors have influenced how the relationship between nature and the city is perceived, and in particular have helped to justify the urban control of nature. The narratives found in Grand Forks also reveal a broader understanding of the nature of Western cities, highlighting the potent and ethically-rich intersections between religion, cities and nature.

Chapter 1

Urban Nature, Disaster, and Religion

The farms and prairie along the border of North Dakota and Minnesota provide a landscape that is either oppressively flat or breathtakingly open, depending on one’s perspective. The roads are straight, and trees only appear as narrow windbreaks protecting farms and as tight pockets of growth surrounding the occasional farmhouse. In the midst of this thinly populated landscape lies Grand Forks, an urban outpost which, like Fargo to the south and Winnipeg to the north, sits along the serpentine lines of the Red River of the North.

In the springtime of particularly wet years, this river overflows its curving lines and spreads for miles through the surrounding countryside, turning farmland into a vast lake and threatening the small cities and towns along the river, including Grand Forks. This is what happened in the spring of 1997, when water from quickly melting snow spilled over the city’s dike system, inundating the urban landscape with the city’s largest recorded flood, destroying neighborhoods near the river and causing an electrical fire which burned several prominent downtown buildings. In the years following the flood, however, Grand Forks has largely been rebuilt: downtown buildings have been restored and replaced, and several neighborhoods were abandoned along the river as the city created a large park within a newly enlarged dike system.

The 1997 flood, along with the rebuilding that came after it, forms a case study for this book, which looks at how people understand the relationship between cities and their environments, and the role that religious language plays in making sense of that relationship in the public sphere. Based on responses to the flood, it shows that religious factors have indeed influenced how the relationship between nature and the city is perceived in the United States and, more specifically and more crucially, that religious narratives and images helped to reinforce a basic disposition toward the city and its environment, which in turn both influenced how the city itself was rebuilt and helped to justify the urban control of nature.

“Nature” and the “city” have most often functioned as opposites within Western culture, a dichotomy that has been reinforced (and sometimes challenged) by religious images, particularly from Christianity. Cities and natural environments, however, are both connected and continually affected by each other – urban centers are dependent on the resources provided by their hinterlands, and cities in turn affect the ecosystems to which they belong through things such as agricultural development, mining, and pollution. Grand Forks, for instance, is a river town that was originally built to take advantage of the Red River for transportation. While this utilitarian function quickly subsided, Grand Forks is still (like every city) dependent upon a global network of food and “natural” resources, and more locally relies upon agricultural commodities such as grain and sugar beets. Such connections become quite overt in natural disasters, which, by necessity, involve a dramatic rupture of nonhuman nature into human spaces where they are not welcome; muddy river water flows through the streets and living rooms. The possibility of controlling nature, in other words, is put into question.

As discussed later in this chapter, disasters do at least two other things. First, they disrupt the narratives people use to make sense of the world; often, because it is a primary way of constructing meaning out of life, religious language thus becomes prominent during and after disasters. Labeling a disaster an “act of God” is one stereotypical example of this. Second, disasters also create an environment which exaggerates existing social conditions and human-natural relationships, making them easier to discern.¹ People often do not have reason to reflect actively on the relationship between their city streets and the river; when the river has overtaken those streets, however, that relationship becomes paramount in people’s minds. Because of these things, urban natural disasters provide spaces in which religiously informed assumptions about the urban environment are most visible. The particular case of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, along with the city’s subsequent redevelopment, provides an especially enlightening case study of how the urban environment is perceived: because (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) it was an urban natural disaster, most public responses consistently blamed the flood on nature; and while the flood destroyed much of the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods, the city has largely been rebuilt in ways that intentionally take into account the river which flows through it.

While the bulk of this book is thus comprised of an analysis of Grand Forks during and after the 1997 flood, the concern that motivates the project is in fact much broader. That is, the disaster in Grand Forks is important because it can tell us something about US cities in general. The primary undertaking of this project is thus not to form a history or analysis of the flood, which other books have already done quite successfully (e.g., Porter 2001; Fothergill 2004), nor is it to learn lessons about disasters and effective disaster recovery, which is a much more common way of studying disasters. Rather, it is to learn something about religion, cities and nature. This book also is about “public religion,” as the title suggests, not in the more common sense of looking at the public influence of religious institutions and practioners (e.g., Casanova 1994), but in the sense that it is concerned with religious ideas and narratives as they exist in the public sphere. The underlying questions are: first, what are some of the dominant (religious) perceptions of the city and nature in this strand of American culture? And, second, how do these images relate to the actual built infrastructures of cities, and Grand Forks in particular?

Cities and Nature

Western perceptions of the city – such as the city as ordered and civilized, or as a den of temptation and violence – emerge out of a history that is laced with religious, and, most often, Christian, influences. Richard Sennett, for instance, in The Conscience of the Eye (1990), finds several religious roots in the urban design of Western Europe and the US since at least St Augustine. In the case of medieval Europe, he contends that the “secular” spaces outside of large churches were “jumbled together” with streets that were “twisted and inefficient,” while the sacred space of the church was ordered and rational (12). Puritan colonies in Massachusetts strove to build a “city upon a hill,” often more as a moral platitude than a planning regime, but their instrumentalist and efficient view of the world also helped to develop the modern urban grid. And in more modern times, the French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier saw in the clean and straight lines of modernist design a faith in “structural perfection,” comparing the skyscrapers of New York to medieval cathedrals (169). European and American religious history is full of other urban images as well. Augustine, for instance, wrote of Christians as belonging to the “city of God,” though that city was heavenly, not earthly (Brown 2000), the Christian Bible ends with the creation of a heavenly New Jerusalem, and in the nineteenth-century US the city was often portrayed as a haven of sin and corruption.²

Concepts of “nature” also have a long and parallel religious tradition in the West. Nature has been seen in a variety of ways – as a book or a revelation through which to encounter God; as a sacred part of God’s creation; as a gift from God to be managed wisely, stewarded or taken care of; as a resource for human uses; and as something dangerous and in need of civilization and domestication. In many cases these perceptions of the environment are rooted in images that arise out of Christianity; at other times, they are informed by religious impulses outside of any particular religious institution, such as using nature as a moral guide or fearing Mother Nature.³

When we talk about nature or the city, we are talking about both ideas as well as material worlds. That is, we inherit and shape narratives or concepts that symbolically construct how we perceive nature or the city, but cities and their environments are also material worlds that affect how we interact with one another and think about urban or natural environments. Both of these levels are important, as the city and nature are closely related to each other, not only materially, but also symbolically. Our ideas about cities and nature are often pitted against one another – for example, cities are civilized, whereas nature is wild – but cities are also physical incorporations of nature, transformations of “first natures”⁴ into a built environment of streets, buildings and parks. The later chapters of this book, which focus on Grand Forks, for instance, will thus focus not only on how people described their city, but also on the physical infrastructure of the city itself, along with its river.

Such physical incorporations are not simply benign, however: a significant dynamic between cities and nature is the control of nature, especially through urban development. In the city, nature is civilized; it shifts from wild prairie to parks and asphalt, from forests into lumber. This controlling or civilizing of nature can take on multiple faces, and has been justified by multiple forms of rhetoric, including religious rhetoric. During the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, the urban-nature relationship was often portrayed as a battle of the city (with God in its side) versus nature, or of order versus chaos. Within months of the waters receding, nature became more commonly viewed as both a force whose power needs to be controlled, as well as a recreational space that complements the downtown being rebuilt. In a city where the control of the Red River is of paramount concern, this included building a dike system to contain the river, restoring ecosystems and constructing parkland, and maintaining potable water. Grand Forks is a river town not only because it is built alongside a river whose banks are full of parks, playgrounds, and fishing holes, but also because the city’s existence is dependent upon confining and controlling the river.

While not always so obvious as an elaborate dike system, efforts to control our environments lie at the root of urban planning for any town or city; indeed, controlling nature is at the root of all human development, from cooking food to building a home to protecting a place from catastrophic disaster. The implications of controlling nature thus lie at the root of this book, as not only are cities dependent on controlling their natural environments, but (as is evident in a disaster) those efforts at control also – somewhat ironically – make cities more vulnerable to widespread destruction. Both the struggle and failure to contain the flood in 1997 and the efforts simultaneously to rebuild the city and to protect it from future disasters are, at their roots, unambiguous efforts to control nature. Together, these twin efforts, which were both strongly supported by religious imagery, point to deep ambiguities concerning the environmental sustainability of controlling our environments. They also, however, call into question the common environmentalist assumption that controlling nature is necessarily destructive and unsustainable.

Methodology

These pages were written in central Minnesota, a couple of hours away from the Red River Valley. The house where I wrote many of these chapters sits a block from Red River Avenue, named after the nineteenth-century trade route that once followed the Red River on its way from Winnipeg, through Grand Forks and Fargo, and which then cut across central Minnesota on its way to Minneapolis and St Paul. I was drawn to study Grand Forks, and the devastating flood it experienced in 1997 as the Red River overflowed its banks, through meeting several people from the area. My original research intentions were much broader – previous research on religious constructions of “nature” and nature’s perceived opposite, humanity, led me to suspect that there is also something religious about how we understand the relationship between nature and that most human of spaces, the city. I set about searching for a way to ask whether that was so through the investigation of specific cases, and, if so, how. Reactions to the Grand Forks flood became an ideal case study for two reasons. First, the flood was an instance where there was a clear conflict between a city and its environment; it thus seemed reasonable that in such a context people would be talking about how the two should relate. Second, I suspected that religious language would most likely surface during such a disaster, when people, whether or not they consider themselves as being particularly religious, are searching for a way to find meaning in a world that has collapsed around them.

I took an initial trip to Grand Forks in May 2008 to see the city and to determine if the archived resources at the University of North Dakota (UND) were extensive enough for a chapter case study within a larger project on cities, nature, and religion through the lens of disasters. The UND archives are indeed quite impressive, but what captivated (and continues to captivate) me, and convinced me to make Grand Forks the focus of what has become this book, was how the city had recovered in the eleven years that had passed since the flood.

Not only had the downtown managed to rebuild itself with some success, providing the urban basics of spaces for working, eating, and living, but the city also built an enormous greenway – essentially a long, narrow park – that travels the entire length of the Red River through town, totaling over 2000 acres. Within a ten-minute walk of downtown, for instance, one can go camping (legally), go fishing, ride a bike or ski along a trail, or walk in a meditative labyrinth. The interplays between urban and natural spaces rise to the surface in a uniquely transparent way in such a place, as Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will describe in more detail. As these chapters will also demonstrate, these developments are evidence of a great deal of concerted thought on how the city should relate to its environment, simultaneously celebrating the river while also remaining consistent with a logic found during the flood that argued for controlling nature and “keeping faith” in the city and its rebuilding.

Grand Forks, I am convinced, is a particularly instructive case study because not only was ample religious language present in responses to the flood, but the city was later rebuilt to take more fully into account its river. This allows us to ask both how the city’s relationship to its environment was perceived during and after the flood, as well as how that relationship was navigated during the rebuilding of the city and the river’s dike system.

As a way of uncovering the changing perceptions of the urban environment in the aftermath of the Grand Forks floods and the role of religion in shaping or reinforcing those perceptions, this book primarily relies upon content analysis of documents from a variety of sources, including publications by Christian organizations as well as sources, such as newspapers, not formally affiliated with any religious tradition. Unlike more common approaches to religion and disasters, such as Brand’s (1999) work on the therapeutic role of religious rhetoric in sermons during the aftermath of the Grand Forks flood, this book not only evaluates responses from religious institutions (such as churches and denominational relief agencies), but also from the broader public, with the hope of ascertaining how religious imagery related to how the flood and rebuilding were perceived on a broad scale.

From the summer of 2008 through the summer of 2010, primary data was collected from library archives,⁵ databases, and by directly contacting organizations and denominational archives. This data was derived from several types of sources. Religious media were surveyed, including print publications and websites of religious organizations and denominations, as well as national Christian magazines, such as the Christian Century and Sojourners. The majority of this material was derived from groups with a large population in the area and who were actively involved in relief efforts (i.e., Lutherans, United Methodists, and Roman Catholics). Because national coverage of the flood was relatively contained to the first few months following the flood, coverage at this level was relatively low. All religious media catalogued in the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Religion Database were searched, using relevant keywords. Popular, nonreligious media were also surveyed, including magazines, national and local newspapers,⁶ popular books and children’s books, photo e...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Continuum
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Urban Nature, Disaster, and Religion
• Chapter 2: Religious Meaning-Making and the Urban Environment
• Chapter 3: Urban Development in the Red River Valley
• Chapter 4: A Hard Land: The City against the River
• Chapter 5: Living in a River Town: The Control and Celebration of Nature
• Chapter 6: Religion, Cities, and the Control of Nature
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index