Constantly stimulating ... a lateish-life appraisal of what Richard Sennett has read, written and, most vitally, witnessed on the street or in the marketplace in the tradition of the sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed flaneur taking in every sensation -- Jonathan Meades * Guardian *
Sennett leavens the big ideas with snapshots of real life. ... It reads like a summation of a life lived in cities and is, ultimately, a paean to their unpredictability, a call for tolerance and a celebration of difference -- Edwin Heathcote * Financial Times *
He has brought to the study of urban life a perception that includes literature, philosophy, art, sociology and economics, as well as his personal experiences -- Rowan Moore * Observer *
Distils into a single volume his thoughts on how urban design shapes the ways in which we relate to one another ... Sennett is as passionate as ever about the richness and complexity of public life ... The nub of Building and Dwelling is that the open city is a demanding place ... one that requires us to embrace difference, even if we do not identify with it. Typically idealistic, typically urbane [it is] well-timed for the disputes of our day -- Justin McGuirk * New Yorker *
Richard Sennett is a thoughtful writer with far-ranging interests and a keen eye for hidden patterns and complex processes that may escape the casual observer. He has always been a pleasure to read. His first book, The Uses of Disorder, published almost 50 years ago (1970), was a reflection on the value of anti-authoritarian or anti-hierarchical anarchy in city life, and his new book, his 15th, is a more elaborate, and more sophisticated, take on his original insights. -- Shlomo Angel * Wall Street Journal *
No one knows more than he about cities and the efforts that have been made over the past two centuries to order and plan them to make them more liveable for their inhabitants. It is this eternally problematic relationship between the city's form - buildings, streets, highways, transport networks - and the quality of collective life it can offer its citizens, that has been at the heart of his life-long project as an urbanist and practising planner. -- Jerry White * Times Literary Supplement *
Brilliant ... Essential reading for all students of the city -- Anna Minton * Prospect *
Richard Sennett is my kind of urbanist ... he embodies Ruskin's belief that of thousands who can think, there is one who can see -- Simon Jenkins * Sunday Times *
As they glide between urban planning and workplace sociology, architectural history and pragmatist philosophy, Sennett's graceful and congenial books dispense wisdom without hubris on an enviable range of topics -- Boyd Tonkin * Tablet *
Offers the sort of intellectual provocation that can make inquisitive planners question just about everything they do and everything they think about cities -- Josh Stephens * Los Angeles Review of Books *