Richard Sennett traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai
The interest is, instead, in the porosity of borders between its neighbourhoods, the contact between rich and poor, native and immigrant. His concrete proposals are, perhaps, less clear than his written analysis. But then again, he quotes the architect Robert Venturi, who called for a 'richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning'. That is almost a book review in a single sentence.
Building and Dwelling is exhilarating and readable, but it is also demanding. Sennett seems to assume the reader knows what or whom he is citing and forces the reader to fill in transitions to keep track of the ways that his ideas weave together ... What Sennett does do — probably better than any other scholar could — is pull urban planners out of the daily grind of pragmatism. He offers the sort of intellectual provocation that can make inquisitive planners question just about everything they do and everything they think about cities. That’s not to say that Building and Dwelling will cause anyone to abandon their principles. Rather, it presents a time-out for the reassessment of principles and a reminder that city-building is, to invoke another duality, as much an intellectual endeavor as it is a pragmatic one.