IN HIS NEW BOOK, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett does not restrain himself from a little name-dropping. Several luminaries, dead and alive, make appearances. There’s Saskia Sassen, who happens be his wife, and, of course, there’s Jane Jacobs, with whom Sennett jawed at the White Horse Tavern in New York City and visited on occasion during her exile in Toronto.
Building and Dwelling, Sennett’s 15th book on urbanism, is an intellectual romp that — in just the first four pages — includes encounters with St. Augustine, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Immanuel Kant, and Nicholas Negroponte. At once trying to build a modern philosophy of cities while acknowledging, as he did most famously in The Uses of Disorder, the inherent messiness of cities, Sennett uses a compelling framework and aspires to an admirable, if elusive, goal. The framework is that of ville and cite. The former refers to the physical entity of the city, and the latter refers to its human element: how people live in, think about, and relate to their cities — hardware and software, for lack of a better metaphor. Sennett’s goal is nothing less than an articulation of how to achieve, or at least think about, the ethical city in the 21st century. It’s no small task.
Sennett takes full advantage of the breadth and vagueness of the concept of “ethics” to discuss seemingly anything and everything that comes into his mind. His title derives from a Heidegger essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Sennett notes, “The absence of commas indicates that these three concepts form one experience.” Thus, parts of Building and Dwelling read like streams of consciousness, in which Sennett leaps from one concept to another and one thinker to another, philosophers and urbanists (some prominent, some obscure) coming and going breathlessly. A mention of Aesop’s fables on one page follows is followed by a description of Songdo, South Korea, on the next. Street life in Medellín gives way to another reference to Balzac, then to William James, and then to Leibniz (“Leibniz zooms out; James zooms in”). 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.
Readers, therefore, might benefit from having at least a casual knowledge of philosophy and/or urban planning. Background knowledge of Heidegger, specifically, helps locate a central thread; Heidegger influences Sennett with an abstract rumination on physical buildings, the act of dwelling, the act of building, and the act of thinking about all three. Heidegger does not so much get at the essence of these things as he does raise questions about their complex relationship to each other and to humanity — much as Sennett does, just with examples from the material world.
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