Reflections on Democracy and Urban Form gathers the conversation that followed Richard Sennett's 1981 Harvard lectures back into print—four decades on, with the political stakes altered but the questions intact.
About this book
In autumn 1981 Richard Sennett delivered six lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under the title Democracy and Urban Form, arguing that social discourse is the foundation of democracy and that cities are uniquely positioned to either enable or constrict it. Those lectures were published in 2024 by Harvard Design Press and Sternberg Press. This volume is the sequel to that publication: on 10 October 2024, a panel convened at the GSD to respond to them.
Richard Sennett, Diane E. Davis, Miguel Robles-Durán, Claire Zimmerman and Markus Miessen take up the connections between democracy and justice, architecture and urban design, the growth of cities, cosmopolitanism, inclusion and free speech. The political climate of 1981 was a different one, but the panel's readiness to test Sennett's core insight against present conditions—polarisation, exclusion, contested public space—is what gives the book its charge.
Key features
- Provocations from a panel convened at Harvard GSD in October 2024
- Contributions from Richard Sennett, Diane E. Davis, Miguel Robles-Durán, Claire Zimmerman and Markus Miessen
- Companion volume to Democracy and Urban Form (ISBN 9781915609472)
- Published in The Incidents, a Sternberg Press series drawn from events at Harvard GSD, edited by Ken Stewart and Marielle Suba and designed by ELLA
What you'll discover
- How Sennett's argument that discourse underwrites democracy holds up against four decades of urban and political change
- Where five scholars agree and diverge on the relationship between spatial design and democratic life
- Why questions of cosmopolitanism, inclusion and free speech have become sharper rather than settled since 1981
- What a panel format—provocation and response rather than sustained lecture—opens up that a monograph cannot
About the contributors
Richard Sennett is a sociologist and urban theorist, senior adviser to the United Nations on its programme on climate change and cities, and the author of The Fall of Public Man and The Corrosion of Character, among others. Diane E. Davis is Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at Harvard GSD. Markus Miessen is principal of Studio Miessen in Berlin and Professor of Urban Regeneration at the University of Luxembourg. Miguel Robles-Durán and Claire Zimmerman work on urbanism and architectural history respectively.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 230 x 147mm
- Pages: 68
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781915609977
- Publisher: Sternberg Press
- Publication date: 2026
Perfect for
Architects and urban designers thinking about public space and political life, students of urban theory, and readers of Sennett looking for the contemporary argument his lectures have provoked.