Richard Sennett

Poiesis Means Making

Poiesis means making. It means making our world, but it also means making ourselves. The idea that the world is created by people in history, both consciously and through cumulative unintended effects, represents the bulwark of the modern secular social sciences. From this foundation, scholars have argued that fundamental features of our world that we often take to be natural, from race and gender to politics and the economy, are actually products of human making. This is the basis for the twined concepts of social construction and human agency. Rarely, however, do we focus on construction not as a metaphor but as a concrete human activity. While the terms social construction and human agency both point toward the study of creative activity, they tend to operate at a level of abstraction that seldom contains analysis of how things are actually created, including the conditions of creation as well as the products that come out of it. This special issue of Public Culture is based on a collective research project, the Poiesis Fellowship, which aims to shed light on human creativity.1 In the pages that follow, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars — from a physicist based in Munich to a journalist based in Bombay to a filmmaker based in New York — examine creativity not just as an idea but as a concrete practice, as something we do, and as something we do not simply in special circumstances but in our everyday lives. Our focus is on the city, as both a context for creative action and a product of that creative action. Our decision to focus on cities is a strategic one. As the centers of contemporary economic power and influence, cities are now home to more than half of humanity. They are sites of global connections and interactions across basic

Urban disorder today.

Rob Sampson’s research has important implications for how we understand cities, in the way urbanites themselves understand each other. Sampson demonstrates that perceptions of urban disorder are fundamentally tied to the hard facts of racial and economic inequality, which is to say that the visual evidence of disorder is projective rather than deductive (in psychoanalytic terms). This means we are processing something other than what we see directly. In one way this finding is not surprising, but in another it is quite original. Not surprisingly, urbanites, like all human beings, possess a code for analysing sense data. Surprisingly, Sampson shows us that most urbanites use the same code. A purely interest-based or identity-view would suggest that poor blacks see less disorder in their own environments than do rich white outsiders. Sampson’s research demonstrates that a common yardstick of malaise defines urban perceptions. Originally, he shows the variability over time in these perceptions, as patterns of race, wealth, and migration re-configure the city. His work has implications that go beyond measures of perception. The immigrants and migratory processes which diversify cities in time also promise to diminish the fear of disorder; that is, the more dynamic a city can become, the less fearfully chaotic it will seem. In British and American terms, this means looking at immigrants as a positive source of urbanity. This is not how police officers think, but Sampson’s conclusions ask us as planners to stop thinking like police officers. Because Sampson quotes my early book, The Uses of Disorder (Sennett 1970), I’d like to add a note on where I see the issue of urban disorder today, 45 years after writing the book.When I wrote it, I wanted to affirm the positive vitality of certain forms of perceived disorder: these perceptions can stimulate awareness of others as much as arouse fear and desire for withdrawal.All truly adult experience negotiates tension and dissonance, rather than seeks, as younger human beings necessarily must do, for a more fixed sort of security. In the America of the 1970s, the built environment – rigidly segregated into zones,

American Cities: The Grid Plan and the Protestant Ethic

By expanding on the relation between space and culture, this chapter scrutinizes the interaction between the grid plan and the Protestant Ethic. Moving between a critique of religious philosophy and the psychology of the urban form as a social construct, the chapter exemplifies the entanglement of cultural values with the spatial order. The author argues that this entanglement and its particular realization in the very form of U.S. cities has had a powerful effect on modern vision, just as, in Max Weber’s formulation, religious techniques of self-regulation continued long after religious faith had waned. The chapter suggests that the American grid plan was a sign of a peculiarly modern form of repression based upon the denial of meaning and difference through the production of abstract urban spaces of neutrality.

Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History

Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History. Edited by

The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

TEPHF, N TH•,•tNST•O•a and •acHaao S•,NN•,TT. New Haven and London, Yale University Press [Montreal, McGill University Press], I969. Pp. xiv, 43 o.

The Hidden Injuries of Class

•3.75. Montreal: ,4 Brie[ History. JOHN mWIN COOP•.•t. Montreal and London, McGillQueens University Press, 1969 . Pp. viii, • • 7.

The Corrosion of Character

6.5o. Montreal: From Mission Colony to Great World City. L•,SLI•, •tOB•,•tTS. Toronto, Macmillan, •969 . Pp. xvi, 356, illus.

The Culture of the New Capitalism

8.95. Illustrated Historical Atlas o[ the County of York. Selected and reprinted from the original •878 edition. Toronto, Peter Martin Associates, I969. Pp. xxii, 64, •naps, illus.

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization

• 7.5ø.