BOOK REVIEW: LECTURE CIRCUIT

Democracy and Urban Form by Richard Sennett Published by Harvard Design Press and Sternberg Press (2024)

By Todd Woodward, AIA

“By encouraging experiences of otherness, fragmentation, contradiction, and dissonance in city life, we can contest the larger culture of domination.” — Richard Sennett, Lecture 6 (December 16, 1981)

Richard Sennett is a Chicago-born sociologist with a long history of teaching — primarily in New York and London — and publishing. His work often intersects with planning and design issues, most directly in his volumes, The Conscience of the Eye, The Craftsman, and Building and Dwelling.

During the fall of 1981, Sennett was invited to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). These lectures focused on the contributions of a city’s form and spatial characteristics to a democratic society and, conversely, the ways that city form and design might frustrate or hinder the development of democracy. After more than 40 years, the lectures have been collected and published in a volume titled Democracy and Urban Form, an appropriate theme for us to consider on the occasion of the semiquincentennial.

The lectures each tackle a distinct theme or element of urban planning and design, but the content and approach overlap. Lecture titles include: “Democracy Disabled,” “The Desire for Isolation out of Fear,” “The Civilized Modern City,” “Two Kinds of Community
(Neither a Solution)” and “The Town Square.” While the language and reasoning can be esoteric and challenging to decipher, the overall tone conveys two opposing thoughts. On the one hand, Sennett was certainly dismayed at the current (1981) state of design thinking, and he notes that students and young design professionals at the time had lost faith in the design process. Design, in their minds, had become simply a reflection of prevailing social and economic conditions, and was incapable of instigating change.

Conversely, Sennett was optimistic about the transformative power of design and structured a lot of his teaching around this belief. In the lectures, he argues that design, if practiced thoughtfully and in a disciplined way, is one of society’s foremost tools to effect change. Sennett noted that engaged design can effect changes ranging from small, individual, day-to-day improvements to larger, collective, societal scale manifestations.

How exactly can design support democracy? A thread running through Sennett’s writing is encountering differences. In order for a democracy to function reasonably, people need to interact with — and perhaps be challenged by — those who come from different backgrounds, who live different types of lives. This mixing of different types of people is the essence of what democracy means to Sennett, and it is something best achieved in urban environments. In 1981, Sennett noted that increasing dependence on the car over forms of public transportation posed a threat to this kind of experience. Now, we can add the internet to the list of factors contributing to isolation and a decrease in experiences of difference.

According to Sennett, architecture and design have potential at different scales to counteract these trends. He believes in the visionary potential of design and its power over the imagination. But he also appreciates the practical impact of design on how people interact. In an interview discussing the newly published GSD lectures,1 Sennett stated:

Oftentimes, people will embody a practice that they can’t or wouldn’t explain. It’s true about all aspects of life, that people do things which they are not consciously masterminding. That’s certainly true about the relations between people in social space, in physical space. An assembly line can be racially mixed, yet the people working on it aren’t thinking about what racial integration is. They’re just working together. That’s another aspect of this same shift; it’s too great a burden on people to explain what they’re doing as though the actions that they’re taking are consequences of conscious decisions. There’s a whole issue about democratic theory: Often we act on knowledge which is not fully articulated to our self.

“How exactly can design support democracy? A thread running through Sennett’s writing is encountering differences. In order for a democracy to function reasonably, people need to interact with — and perhaps be challenged by — those who come from different backgrounds, who live different types of lives. This mixing of different types of people is the essence of what democracy means to Sennett, and it is something best achieved in urban environments.

This has implications for how we consider design decisions. Thoughtful design can inform and encourage patterns of activity that increase tolerance and improve democracy in a slow incremental way, without the impact necessarily being obvious or apparent to everyone. Thinking of design in this way provides hope. I believe that architects and design professionals — when practicing ethically and responsibly — require this optimism to see their work through.

In the time since the original delivery of these lectures, efforts around community engagement in design have expanded. Certainly, the work of our own Community Design Collaborative provides wonderful examples of both more democratic design processes and results. However, so does the work of many individual practitioners of the craft of design, in Philadelphia and elsewhere. And yet, two things can be true: Things are better, and things can be so much better. While portions of Democracy and Urban Form are understandably dated, it is worth reading to renew your optimism that design can make a difference. Sennett’s lectures are a reminder that the practice of design can and should be a part of the solution.

TODD WOODWARD is a principal of SMP Architects and a co-chair of the CONTEXT Editorial Board. 1

www.gsd.harvard.edu/2024/10/an-interview-with-richard-sennett-democracy-and-urban-form