Democracy and Urban Form

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse?

Never have the potential political consequences of architecture been greater, and never has the political sensibility of architecture been less.

This was the state of the discipline that social theorist and urban thinker Richard Sennett declared when he addressed an audience at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1981. Over a series of six lectures, Sennett presented discourse as the foundation of democracy and posited that our cities are uniquely positioned to either empower or constrict this discourse—and that the difference could lie in architecture and urban design.

Now, over 40 years later, as political polarisation persists and its consequences arise in both new and familiar ways, Democracy and Urban Form revisits questions that remain relevant—If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse?