In what style should we plan?: Unity, discontinuity and the ‘complex spacing’ of the nation form

Brock-Moneo proposes examining the American small town as a ‘nation form’. This paper takes up that invitation through close readings of the sources on which Brock-Moneo draws, principally Alex Krieger’s City on a Hill and Ryan Poll’s Main Street and Empire; these texts are read alongside the reception of early progressive ideas and an intellectual history of the covenanted community through Rodgers and Smith, and defracted through the architectural philosophy of Andrew Benjamin. In so doing, this essay examines a specific claim to historical and spatial determinism which, in extremis, underpins an understanding of spatial form as a site of moral regeneration within urban design; a signature which is often misrecognised, but remains central to both the articulations and critiques of New Urbanist thought.