Introduction | Investigation | Housing and Neighbourhoods

The Open City

By Richard Sennett

THE CLOSED SYSTEM AND THE BRITTLE CITY

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...

Key Questions

01

Are neighbourhoods becoming more locally homogeneous and segregated from the wider social fabric of the city? What are the negative aspects of this form of urban differentiation and fragmentation?

02

What types of built environments support diverse neighbourhoods and inclusive local communities? How can housing and urban design enhance the coexistence of various social groups including families that opt for “city life” over suburbanization?

03

Is there such a thing as an optimum urban density? How much variation of densities should there be between dense urban cores and more sparsely developed peripheral areas?

04

What kind of local infrastructure is needed to create sustainable neighbourhoods? How does this infrastructure connect to metropolitan-wide systems to integrate neighbourhoods to the larger functioning of the city?

05

Can we solve the lag and even mismatch between infrastructure provision and rapid housing development? Especially in fast-growing areas of the developing world.