What is a city to humans and how should it be built?
Moving through space and inhabiting places,
Urban sociology for humans struggling to build lives and build the world.
The final installment in the Homo Faber trilogy, following "The Craftsman" and "Together."

A reading of the city by Richard Sennett, a world-renowned scholar of labor and urbanization studies.
In this book, he reflects on and proposes ideas about cities, transcending time and space, from ancient Athens to 21st-century Shanghai.
Reflecting on how Paris, Barcelona, ​​and New York became what they are today, the book explores the ideas of major thinkers such as Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt, while traveling to iconic locations ranging from the back alleys of Medellín, Colombia, to Google's headquarters in New York, and Songdo, South Korea, to show how physical cities can enrich people's everyday experiences and strengthen social bonds—or vice versa.
In this book, where the relationship between the physical city being built, 'ville', and the mental city 'cite' that citizens experience in their daily lives is constantly changing, Sennett uses his broad and deep knowledge and delicate insight to examine how and to what extent closed cities—cities where architectural segregation and social inequality reinforce each other—have increased, and proposes an alternative, the open city.
In open cities, people can reveal and accept their differences, learn to deal with complexity, and become more resilient in the face of both short-term and long-term threats and uncertainties, such as the climate crisis.

In his 1784 essay on life in the Cosmopolis, Immanuel Kant argued that “nothing straight can ever be made from the crooked timber of man.”
The city is a melting pot, teeming with immigrants of diverse backgrounds speaking dozens of languages.
It is also distorted because the inequality within it is so obvious.
Just blocks away from where the slim, stylish women eat lunch are the tired janitors, and there are too many young graduates and too few jobs.
Could physical buildings solve these problems? Could plans to pedestrianize streets alleviate the housing crisis? Would using reinforced insulated glass in buildings make people more tolerant of immigrants? Cities seem to be torn apart by the asymmetry between the city and the ville.

--- p.10~11

The experience of road speed defines a particular version of modernity: 'fast is free, slow is unfree.'
The formula of always having to move as fast as possible to wherever you want diminishes our instinctive sense of place.
You are just passing by.

--- p.58~59

The Boisin Plan illustrates one aspect of fluid modernity: the erasure of the past.
Le Corbusier imagined new districts built of unpainted or white-painted concrete.
Using such colors is meant to challenge the way the passage of time leaves traces on physical materials.
Old buildings and worn paving stones indicate that the physical environment has been used.
Residence leaves traces.
Unpainted or white-painted concrete was attractive to Le Corbusier because it symbolized that a building could be restored at any time, as if no one had ever lived there.
There is a tempting logic to using materials in this way:
To live your own life, you need to break with the past.
To live in the present, eliminate the marks left by time that bring back memories, habits, and beliefs of the past.
Paint the bill white.
White signifies newness and now.

--- p.109~110

Naked power needs clothes to survive.
That is, you have to legitimize yourself.
The promise of growth is one way.
Growth encompasses economic, political, and technological progress all at once.

--- p.146

Mrs. Q was questioning the discernment of Western thinking about Chinese cities.
One time I gave her Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities and told her to read it.
I thought you might like that book.
But she didn't like it.
Because that great American who championed small towns, slow growth, and bottom-up politics was so "American."
Slow growth is something only rich countries can afford.
Moreover, Mrs. Q naively regarded Jane Jacobs's ideas about spontaneity.
For her, spontaneity meant the Red Guard units she had been stationed in during the Cultural Revolution.

--- p.163~164

Adult refugees didn't learn enough Swedish, as is common when adults learn a foreign language. The only work they could do was manual labor.
In contrast, adolescent children acquired language at a faster rate.
Adults have seen children easily learn foreign languages ​​and quickly embrace foreign cultures.
As children become more integrated, they may forget the hardships and trauma that brought their parents there in the first place.
After some time had passed since settling in, many parents began to worry that their children might actually turn out that way.
Integration was both a practical salvation and an experiential loss.
How would you live in a place where you don't belong? Conversely, how would others treat you in such a place?
--- p.183

I was fortunate enough to attend a few of Levinas' weekly lectures on Torah interpretation, and I found them confusing.
Why did he devote so much time to the arduous task of translating Hebrew into French? Over time, I realized that translation was precisely the issue his ethical vision addressed.
Languages ​​reach out to each other, but they encounter insurmountable limitations.
Each language contains irreducible and untranslatable meanings.
In life, such situations exist more widely.
From Levinas's perspective, neighbors are ethical beings who turn to each other, but ultimately do not understand each other.
However, we cannot turn away indifferently just because we do not understand our neighbors.
Because our relationship with our neighbors is precisely the relationship between humans and God, a relationship with a divine being that transcends our capacity to understand.

--- p.186

The idea that the oppressed will unite in solidarity is a naive notion, and in reality, it rarely happens.
Oppression does not produce unity.
Rather, solidarity is a necessary fiction to convey to the ruling class, 'We are strong because we are united.'
The oppressed need to learn to believe and act on this fiction as fact.
Otherwise, the oppressors will use their divisions to divide and rule.

--- p.200

The trend toward frictionlessness reserves attention for the specific details of complex places, even at a trivial level.
For example, instead of going to a local cafe that is hard to get to, you just go to Starbucks.
To take a more serious example, frictionlessness only recognizes the typicality of others, such as blacks or Muslims.
Because identifying the specificity of a black man or a Muslim woman who doesn't fit that stereotype requires mental as well as emotional labor.

--- p.236

You're talking about your father's cruelty, and I 'out of the blue' say that my father is bald.
This unexpected reaction actually frees you from the painful and entrenched stream of monologue the confession of your father's evil deeds that you have kept in your heart for a long time.
The story about my father's baldness lightens the weight of the exchange between you and me, but more importantly, it keeps the exchange going.
I haven't forgotten that your father was cruel.
In fact, I'm going to try to find hints and traces of that in you as I order another glass of alcohol.
We will talk more.

--- p.289

Le Corbusier hoped that a series of identical high-rise buildings could extend indefinitely throughout the Marais district and, by extension, throughout all of Paris.
The design represents a closed system composed of homogeneous, addable parts.
That indiscriminateness was realized in Madame Q's Shanghai and the new towns of Korea.
Identical buildings in such places are distinguished by large numbers written on their exterior walls.
Without seeing the numbers, people have a hard time discerning which building they live in.

--- p.312

A radical element in Van Eyck's park was the concept of how children should play.
The children's playground in his park was not isolated from the road for safety reasons.
There was a chin, but no iron fence.
Van Eyck's position was that children should learn the difference between traffic and grass, and they did.
There have been very few accidents due to this porosity.
In the same way, benches provided for adults were not spatially separated from the areas where children played.
The children learned how to behave so as not to disturb the elderly who were talking or sleeping there.

--- p.332

No planner since Jane Jacobs has said, "Surrender," like Robert Moses.
I don't boldly declare to the public, 'I know what's best.'
Because there are ways to wield the whip more delicately than just making such declarations.
Community building-related 'consultation' typically involves the planning department.
When the department puts forward a proposal, for example, regarding the location and construction method of a new road, and people living near the location or cycling champions raise a loud objection, the planning department “reflects” on the objections after a “beneficial exchange of views” and then proceeds with the project in a manner not significantly different from what was originally intended.
During this process, planners create the illusion that negotiations are actually taking place by embedding details into the proposal that they are willing to discard, much like diplomatic negotiations.

--- p.363

At this time, an expert was absent.
A UN planner had to leave Beirut because of his mother's illness.
When I returned a week later and said, “I’m sorry I left you behind,” the South Beirut man replied,
“We managed to do it ourselves.” They did it by focusing on how much power line the neighborhood needed rather than on their mutual grudges.
The expert's departure did not bring about a warm reconciliation.
Because the burden caused by the difference was too great.
But the plan didn't fall apart even though the expert was gone.

--- p.376

Alexis de Tocqueville used the word democracy in two senses.
The first is the majority rule, which he feared.
Because the majority can oppress the minority, and the 51 percent can oppress the 49 percent.
The second is individualism.
Individualism here means that people separate themselves and focus on their own work.
He feared this kind of individualism.
Because it “silently releases the vitality of action.”
A society where people share almost the same tastes and beliefs, a society where life is simplified and user-friendly, is a society that is losing energy.
It is a society where cooperation between different people is withering away.

--- p.387

Social critic Ash Amin describes the Kantian cosmopolitan as someone who is “indifferent to difference” and thus capable of practicing tolerance.
Tolerance was a core virtue in Karl Popper's definition of an open society.
Isaiah Berlin also said that tolerance is necessary because there is not one truth, but rather a number of conflicting yet equally valid truths.
Tolerance, so to speak, depends on indifference to the truth, or at least on an indifference that does not regard truth as a matter of life and death.

--- p.434~435