California and the Search for the Ideal

Throughout American history city men have looked upon the countryside as a place for a specialized form of urban settlement. Initially interest centered on the physically therapeutic qualities of the countryside, followed, in turn, by the mental recruitment to be experienced there. At the end of the last century this outward migration focussed into two attitudes, the Hudsonian search for the primitive and socially pristine and the Concordian seeking of urban pastorialism. The Concordian led to the shaping of a new settlement form, located largely in Megalopolis, which can be called exurbia, whereas the Hudsonian search encouraged the migration to California as the heartland of “the geography of the ideal'’expressed in social detachment and the cult of the wilderness. There arcadia became the settlement form. In the years since the Second World War the social and intellectual thought of the California arcadia has gained worldwide attention suggesting the importance of an analysis of the urban form in a frame of “three cities'’resolution—the special social districts of the core city, the nativist culture of the suburbs, and the geography of the ideal in arcadia and exurbia.