In new book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, sociologist Richard Sennett traces the troubled relationship between how cities are built and how people actually live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He demonstrates how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to the Google headquarters in Manhattan.
His lament is directed at the “closed city”—segregated, regimented, and controlled— which he says has spread from the global North to the exploding urban agglomerations of the global South. As an alternative, he argues for the “open city,” where citizens actively hash out their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope. At a time when more people live in urban spaces than ever before, Building and Dwelling is a “summation of a life lived in cities and … ultimately, a paean to their unpredictability, a call for tolerance and a celebration of difference,” in the words of Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic for The Financial Times.
_
