Planning for clutter

Cities have always served as hubs of freedom, innovation, and human connection. Public spaces have played a significant social role, encouraging their residents to connect and get to know each other. Everyone is attached to their own city, it is part of their identity, even if it is not perfect, but the modern city has almost completely lost its community-building function. The modern city has more precisely planned and strictly defined land-use rules than ever before, but this orderliness is unable to encourage its residents to engage in community and cooperate as a community. Strict boundaries create alienation: we feel separated from others, from the city's public spaces, and from the beauties of the built environment. In this volume, engineer Pablo Sendra and MIT sociology professor Richard Sennett draw attention to the design methods and built environment elements that encourage social interactions, as urban loneliness has never been as widespread as it is today. The living and open city cannot be created by itself, the authors argue. The volume explores the disruptive steps of urban planning that can dismantle an overly rigid environment and recreate the possibilities of informality and community life. They present urban planning experiments that break down this overly regulated environment and promote the development of more flexible, multi-use public spaces. The volume is therefore not a prescriptive manual, but rather a readable, inspiring, and highly instructive set of suggestions on how urban planning, and with it us, the citizens living in it, can become more open and communal in practice.