In 1962, an eccentric man by the name of James Rouse first proposed his vision for an egalitarian, “new town” utopia situated midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. His proposal was met with skepticism, underneath which grew a latent curiosity.
Rouse believed that with Gatbsy-esque extravagance, a city’s structural design could be engineered to influence its social architecture. He aspired to build a community that would challenge the segregation of 1960s America. Rather than adhere to the normalized practice of placing low-income housing downtown and keeping upper-class houses behind closed gates, Rouse organized his city into concentric circles that brought people of different social and economic backgrounds into common social spheres.
These socially diverse families would feed into the same schools, which — having to meet such a wide range of social and academic needs — would utilize a radical “School of the Future” concept without any classrooms. Rather than churches occupying space on every street corner, Rouse’s city would play host to an assortment of multi-denominational Interfaith Centers, where people of any faith could come and share in one another’s worship. Wherever Rouse saw a wall, he sought to tear it down.
The shining utopia’s name was Columbia. Its motto was something out of a modern day young adult dystopian novel: Columbia — The Next America! (Note the exclamation point. Are you adequately enthused?)
Fifty years after its founding, Rouse’s egalitarian experiment, and my hometown, of Columbia, Md. is No. 1 in Time magazine’s “Best Places to Live 2016,” where it appears consistently for “its excellent social, racial and economic diversity.” It is the American Dream, sprawled out across 32 square miles of star-spangled equality.
The unfortunate thing about living the American Dream is that, after some time, reality starts to settle in. My high school was supposedly among the most diverse in the country, and it consistently published its demographics so as to assert its place as America’s premier educational melting pot of race and culture (45 percent Black, 26 percent Latino, 12 percent White, seven percent Asian, etc.). Its motto, like Columbia’s, was utopian in nature: Wilde Lake High School — Where Diversity Excels. Yet if you had walked into an upper-level class or listened to the praised names on the morning announcements, you would not think of the school as diverse. Low-income students without internet access at home were glued to the bottom floor of the school’s academic hierarchy. At lunch, the cafeteria tables seemed to effortlessly divide the flood of students by skin color and GPA.
Columbia’s Interfaith Centers, meant to encourage interfaith understanding, became a matter of tiptoeing around other religions or re-drawing the lines around them so as to reconcile them with one’s own. How often is it that people would rather shift the the whole world two inches to the left, only so that they do not have to move two inches to the right? The American Dream that Rouse had for his utopia, it seems, was insufficient for its success.
I am not arguing against the American Dream, nor that it is dead. The American Dream — while not uniquely American (see Canada, Finland, Germany and assorted others) — is an aesthetic masterpiece. America has always been better at selling the idea of tomorrow than it has been at selling the reality of today, and I don’t find this inherently problematic. Columbia is still a diverse place, wrought with privilege. However, aesthetic value is not functional value, and I find that there are more important things to believe in than utopia.
Dylan Reynolds, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at DReynolds19@wooster.edu.