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The Meaning of Protestant-Calvinist Imagery in Urban America: An Interpretation of the City-Suburb Structure

Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge-Chelmsford

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: m.hardinghaus{at}anglia.ac.uk.

	Abstract

Inspired by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, and applying a social-geographical framework, this discourse analysis inquires into the influence of religious imagery on a characteristic settlement structure in modern America. Cultural guiding images such as the Garden of Eden and the frontier, built in a tradition of Protestant, Calvinist Puritanism, are linked with a specifically Christian corpus of broadly biblical orientations. They are integral parts of the American way of life and had a lasting impact on modern urban development, particularly in America. Although the dispersed suburbs are supposed to carry on the political ideal of a decentralized society, the topologies of the centralized cities are the hubs of business activity, places of economic assertion. Calvinist imagery plays an important part in this: on one hand, it reflects the desire for a way of settlement that was originally agrarian motivated; on the other, the need for a centralized settlement for economic purposes.

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