Professor Richard Sennett, an eminent sociologist (currently teaching at New York University and the London School of Economics, previously at MIT), has an abiding interest in the urban landscape and in struggling with questions about how within our cities we can find meaning and satisfaction, in work, family life and community, among other things. I would like to suggest that we consider that our local struggle may require a more visionary set of ideals than can be contrived simply by getting any number of us together and asking us what we most want, though knowing how people answer that question is surely informative. I tend to feel that we can expect somewhat more of ourselves - to dream and imagine possibilities, based on the thinking of people like Prof Sennett who have devoted a great deal of time and attention and emotional energy developing models of what might be possible in their estimation to serve our interests in much richer ways than we might initially conceive or formulate them. I think that learning about some of the concepts in play among people who think about these things for a living, both academics and professionals, can well serve our purposes, whatever we might initially think them to be.

Yes, I know, there's quite a bit of material listed below, only some of which I've examined myself (really just the first three items at this point - Prof Sennett's The Uses of Disorder and his talks at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley during the past several years. I list the other items (all of which can be downloaded in the same fashion), which represent only a handful of what he has written over nearly a half century, primarily to offer a richer set of materials, so as to give some indication of the scope and breadth of the thought of this most extraordinary man (he is also an accomplished cellist, and would have become a professional musician were it not for a problem with a hand that made him temporarily have to abandon the instrument rather than continue down that path at that time). As he points out in his writing and speaking, the study of music has done much to inform Prof Sennett's ideas about a wide variety of subjects. (I recall him using as an example of various styles of exerting authority in his book Authority (which I read a long time ago and really love, as I feel it speaks directly to my own experience) how different conductors deal with members of their respective orchestras to produce desired results.)

All of the books below, except for The Uses of Disorder (which is in EPUB format), are in PDF format, and if left clicked, will open in a new browser tab (though it's probably best to download (right click & select "Save Link As") and save the PDF files -- then use an external reader to view them).

books

• The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life (1970) - epub format
  
  
• Other books include:
  • The_Craftsman
    
  • Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation
    
  • Culture of The New Capitalism
    
  • The New Political Economy and Its Culture
    
  • Street and Office: Two Sources Of Identity
    
    
• Fall of Public Man,   Review by Edward J. Curran, Jr.
  
  
• The Corrosion Of Character_ and _The Personal Consequences of Work In The New Capitalism, - a critical reading by Serge Natarajan (2003)
  
  

• The Decline of the Skills Society, December, 2009, U.C. Berkeley (1hr 9min) - MP4 format
  
  
• The Open City, December, 2013, Harvard GSD (1hr 22min) - MP4 format
  
  

• BBC Radio 4 interviewed Richard Sennett for a half hour on 18 January 2006 on its Thinking Allowed programme.
  
  
• Eleanor Wachtel, host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Writers & Company did an hour long interview with Richard Sennett, originally broadcast on 28 December 2014. (Page includes link to audio player and transcript, published in BRICK magazine.)
  To download the audio, use this link instead (right-click & "save link as.")
  
  

• Richard Sennett has a web site, as you might expect.

In case you want to see a bit of either of the videos cited above, rather than, or before, downloading them, here they are:

Enjoy.

Gary