Anti-urbanism, Antisemitism, and City Planning

I will probe the formal similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-urbanism. Anti-Semitism is not simply one branch of a larger problem of racism and anti-urbanism is not simply a hatred of cities. Anti-Semitism poses a distinct world-controlling, racially-corrupting and degenerating power to Jews. Jews are connected by anti-Semites to abstract social forms -- money, credit, intellectualism, liberalism, socialism, “unproductive” labor, and rootlessness. Jews are blamed by anti-Semites, for many of the same things as anti-urbanists blame cities. For many urban planners, mortgages and interest rates on properties which are used as rental properties by their owners are the key cause of overly dense housing. Anti-urbanists claim that this dense housing has destructive effects on family life, hygiene, political radicalism, martial strength, and economic and demographic productivity. The anti-urban planners’ goal was to reconnect the German working class to the soil and make them into property-holding citizens. They believed that this would overcome all of the social ills they blamed on mortgages and interest. The anti-urbanists attacked what they saw as the abstract and dominating character of cities in the name of a more concrete form of social life. This more concrete social life entailed a direct connection to the soil, collectively shared proceeds from land rent, "productive" labor, high birthrates, and property ownership. This goal, I argue, shaped both the formal layout of planned developments and their architectural style.