Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

Renowned public intellectual Richard Sennett shares his thoughts on today’s urban living and his bold and original vision for the future.

Sennett traces the relationship between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to 21st-century Shanghai. He shows how major cities assumed their modern forms and explores emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to the Google headquarters in Manhattan. Sennett laments the spread of the “closed city” — segregated, regimented and controlled — and argues for what he calls an “open city.”