OPEN CITY

Richard Sennett writes about cities, labor, and culture. He teaches sociology at New York University and at the London School of Economics.

Richard writes lucidly about the properties of open and closed cities and some ideas how they can be made He has contributed to  "Endless City" (see Readings) by the Urban Age -  a worldwide investigation into the future of cities:

"The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and

safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a

dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and

also do their best to heal society's divisions of race, class,

and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. Cities

fail on all these counts due to government policy,

irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local

control. The city is not its own master. Still, something

has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of

what a city itself should be. We need to imagine just

what a clean, safe, efficient, dynamic, stimulating, just

city would look like concretely – we need those images

to confront critically our masters with what they should

be doing – and just this critical imagination of the city is

weak. This weakness is a particularly modern problem:

the art of designing cities declined drastically in the

middle of the twentieth century. In saying this, I am

propounding a paradox, for today's planner has an

arsenal of technological tools – from lighting to bridging

and tunnelling to materials for buildings – which

urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to

imagine: we have more resources to use than in the past,

but resources we don't use very creatively. "