Part of my series on good and bad government of our cities in place and time
As the night draws to a close along the harbor of Kennebunkport, we’re reminded of an important insight into the birth of America. The original British colonies had to have been made up of many small communities such as Kennebunkport, which were more or less self-governing and living as they saw fit. But between 1776 and 1789 they were famously combined under new political theories by men such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison.
But how many sons or daughters of New England knew about such theories? It would be far more constructive to look at what was already here in their villages.
Life Before Theory
The abstract ideas within the foundational documents did not beget The United States of America as much as the lived reality of The United Colonies begot America. The traditions of thought in the minds of men who lived along these coastlines weren’t born out of The Enlightenment, but out of love for their local civic freedoms, their local community, their friends, their neighbors, and their local Christian church.
Some say The United States of America was founded as a free Christian nation, but the name Jesus Christ is never mentioned in the founding documents. The so-called Christian nation must rather be proved to have existed through a collection of Christian cities, where each city was local and real, for faith is either lived or it isn’t lived at all.
This is the crucial lesson that Kennebunkport teaches us about the nature of political life: it emerges from the ground up, not from the sky down. The city precedes the theory. The community precedes the constitution. The lived experience of self-governance in small coastal towns and inland villages created the conditions that made American independence thinkable.
The Urban Foundation of National Identity
Throughout this series, we’ve traced how cities are the natural habitat of political animals, how they arose from human necessity long before Vitruvius drew his first architectural plans, how they laid the foundations for nation-states, and how they speak through an architectural language that transcends time and place. In Kennebunkport, we see all these principles alive.
Here is a city that maintains its original form—a harbor town inside an inlet. Here is a community that preserves its traditions while adapting to modernity. Here is a place where the architectural language of New England colonialism still frames daily life, where shingled homes and white porches aren’t museum pieces but living structures.
The colonnade we saw in Kansas City, echoing Athens and Rome, finds its vernacular expression here in the covered porches and widow’s walks of Kennebunkport. The same principles of form and function, of creating spaces that serve both practical needs and aesthetic ideals, manifest differently in different climates and cultures, yet remain recognizable as part of the same urban tradition.
The Precedence of the Local
What makes Kennebunkport a good city? It’s not that it perfectly implements some abstract political theory. It’s not that it represents the ideal form decreed by urban planners. It’s good because it has remained what it essentially is: a self-governing community of people bound together by shared place, shared work, shared rituals, and shared faith.
The lobstermen who stack their traps along the harbor, the restaurant owners who serve the day’s catch, the homeowners who maintain their colonial cottages, the visitors who return year after year—all participate in an urban ecosystem that has developed organically over nearly four centuries. This is not the International Style imposing its vision from above. This is vernacular urbanism at its finest.
When we discussed in earlier posts how cities must be built where they are founded, how they cannot be transported but must grow from their geographical and cultural conditions, Kennebunkport exemplifies this principle. It is what it is because of where it is: on this particular inlet, with access to these particular waters, settled by these particular people with their particular religious and political convictions.
Cities as Laboratories of Self-Government
The Puritans who founded Kennebunkport and similar towns along the New England coast were conducting political experiments. But these were not abstract experiments in philosophy. They were practical experiments in living together, in self-governance, in balancing individual liberty with communal responsibility.
Each town meeting, each shared harvest, each communal defense against hardship or threat, each decision about how to organize public space and private property—these were the laboratories that developed the political instincts and institutions that would later be codified in state and national constitutions.
The famous town hall meetings of New England weren’t invented by political theorists. They emerged naturally from communities that needed to make decisions together. The separation of church and state wasn’t primarily a philosophical position. It emerged from the practical experience of communities where religious conviction informed public life but didn’t entirely determine it, where different denominations had to learn to coexist.
What We’ve Lost and What Remains
In our contemporary moment, when many American cities have grown beyond recognition, when urban sprawl has created “bedroom communities” and “gated suburbs” that lack the coherence of true cities, Kennebunkport reminds us what we’ve lost.
We’ve lost the sense of the city as a complete ecosystem where work and home, commerce and culture, public and private life exist in walking distance of each other. We’ve lost the architectural vernacular that made cities recognizable as themselves rather than as generic expressions of international modernity. We’ve lost the scale at which genuine self-governance and community participation remain possible.
But Kennebunkport also shows us what remains possible. Not every place can or should be a small coastal town in Maine. But every place can ask itself the questions that Kennebunkport asks by its very existence: What is this place essentially? What are the geographical and cultural conditions that make it what it is? How can it grow and adapt without losing its essential character? How can it serve as a stage for human ritual and community life?
The Pattern That Connects
From the ancient trading post in the Tiber River valley that became Rome, through the temple societies of the Near East that became cosmopolitan Hellenic cities, through the grid-planned Roman colonies that became Toledo, Paris, and London, through the coastal settlements of New England that became American cities—we see a pattern.
Cities arise from necessity. They organize themselves around certain functions: defense, trade, worship, governance. They develop architectural languages to express these functions. They create public spaces for community gathering. They balance private interests with public goods. They become laboratories for political experimentation. They preserve traditions while adapting to change.
The good city—whether ancient Athens or modern Kennebunkport—is one that understands and honors this pattern. It recognizes that it exists not to implement abstract theories but to serve the concrete needs of actual people in actual places. It understands that form follows function, but that both form and function serve deeper human purposes: the need to gather, to govern ourselves, to pass on traditions, to create beauty, to live in harmony with our environment.
The City as Our Common Home
As we conclude this series, having traveled from the archetypes that precede all building, through the ancient origins of urban life, through the development of cities into nation-states, through the architectural language that unites all western cities, and finally to this living example in Kennebunkport, we return to a simple truth.
The city is our common home. Not the nation-state, which is an abstraction and a latecomer to history. Not the international order, which speaks no vernacular language and respects no local traditions. But the city—the polis, the urbs, the particular place where particular people gather to live their particular lives together.
When John Winthrop preached about a city on a hill, he understood something that our contemporary world has largely forgotten. He understood that the city is not just a collection of buildings and streets. It’s not just an economic engine or an administrative unit. The city is the fundamental unit of political and cultural life. It’s where abstract principles become concrete practices. It’s where theoretical rights become actual freedoms. It’s where national identity is either lived or remains mere rhetoric.
The good city—from Rome to Kennebunkport—is one that remembers this. It’s one that understands itself as the natural habitat of political animals, as the stage for human ritual, as the preserver of traditions, as the laboratory for self-governance. It’s one that speaks the architectural language that connects it to cities across time and space while remaining rooted in its own particular place.
This is what good government of our cities, in place and time, ultimately means: honoring what cities essentially are while allowing them to become what they’re called to be in their particular circumstances. It means resisting the temptation to impose abstract ideals from above and instead nurturing the organic development that emerges from below. It means remembering that before there were constitutions, there were communities. And it means recognizing that the health of our nations ultimately depends on the health of our cities.
Pax et Bonum!
C.W. Höjer
This is part of my series on the origins and nature of urban life. From ancient archetypes to living examples, we’ve explored what makes cities good or bad, successful or failed. The lessons remain urgent: in an age of globalization and homogenization, we must remember that cities are not interchangeable units but particular places with particular characters. Our task is not to build more cities that look like everywhere else, but to help each city become more fully itself.
What cities have shaped your understanding of urban life? What makes them good or bad?