The Uses of Disorder makes the case, first in 1970 and no less urgently now, that the planned, orderly city is not a triumph of design but a suppression of the social complexity that makes urban life worth living.
About This Book
Written in the wake of the 1968 student uprisings across the United States and Europe, Richard Sennett's polemic targets the deadening logic of modernist urban planning — its compulsion to resolve, contain, and separate. Against the middle-class retreat to the suburbs and the hollowing out of inner cities, Sennett proposes something more demanding: dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities that resist resolution and, in doing so, foster genuine community and identity. For architects, planners, and urban theorists, this remains a foundational text on the relationship between urban form, class, and social life — one that has lost none of its political edge in fifty years.
Key Features
- 224 pages of political and theoretical argument on urban planning, identity, and city life
- Published by Verso, ISBN: 9781839764080
What You'll Discover
- Why the modernist drive toward order in urban planning actively undermines the social richness of city life
- How class dynamics — particularly middle-class suburbanisation — fragment urban communities and deepen inequality
- Sennett's alternative vision of the dense, disordered city as a site for identity formation and genuine civic encounter
- A framework, still relevant to contemporary urbanism, for thinking about disorder not as a failure of planning but as a civic necessity
About the Author
Richard Sennett is a sociologist and urbanist whose work sits at the intersection of city life, labour, and identity. The Uses of Disorder was his first book, establishing the intellectual preoccupations — urban density, social complexity, the costs of order — that have defined his career across subsequent decades.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 224
- Dimensions: 198 x 129mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781839764080
- Publisher: Verso
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers interrogating the social consequences of planning decisions, academics and students of urbanism and city theory, and anyone rethinking the relationship between urban form and community.