Richard Sennett

Born in Chicago in 1943 and raised in the Cabrini-Green public housing project, Sennett was a cellist before training at Harvard with David Riesman, and has taught in New York and at the London School of Economics. The Uses of Disorder (1970), his first book, defended urban disorder as a school of maturity against the purified communities of the suburb, and The Fall of Public Man (1977) traced how public life emptied as intimacy became the only value.

Flesh and Stone (1994) travelled the history of the Western city through the body, from naked Athens to the New York of the elevator, and The Corrosion of Character (1998) and The Craftsman (2008) carried his gaze to work. In Building and Dwelling (2018) he summed up half a century of reflection in the distinction between the ville, the built city, and the cité, the way of living it, and proposed an open, porous, incomplete city against the closed city of total plans and gated developments.

He has advised UN-Habitat and worked with Ricky Burdett on the Urban Age programme at the London School of Economics, and his idea that the competence to live among strangers is what the city teaches has influenced public space design. Critics reproach him for a humanism that says little about capital; he answers that without the cité no ville is worth anything.