Richard Sennett deftly tackles a topic of considerable breadth in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Using primary and secondary sources, fiction and art, Sennett examines six cities at various historical moments in order to explore the development of the relationship between cities and the bodies of their residents. He identifies attitudes toward the self and the Other, towards comfort and pain, that manifest themselves in western urban culture and spaces and, in turn, which act upon the human body dwelling in such spaces. Sennett employs theory from a number of disciplines, including history, sociology, urban development, psychology, economics and cultural anthropology. The latter is used in a way reminiscent of Greg Dening in The Death of William Gooch, where Dening successfully presented western culture as "other" to a western audience; Sennett performs a similar feat by objectifying the stage itself upon which western culture has been enacted - the city. Urban spaces, and how we feel as bodies living in and moving through them, seem strange and manufactured - which they are. We are simply used to cities and how we feel in cities and, so, naturalize them to a certain extent. Sennett erases this naturalization and we see urban space not as an inert backdrop against which we move or as a mere product of human will or design, but as a dynamic organism that has the capability of acting on our bodies even as we act upon it, and of creating our understanding of ourselves in relation to it. The city makes and is made, just as we make and are made. The generative power at play in the relationship between a city and its residents flows both ways.
Sennett examines Athens of the Fifth Century B.C., Rome of the Second Century A.D., thirteenth-century Paris, the Jewish Ghetto in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice, revolutionary Paris, nineteenth-century London and modern New York. Throughout his exploration, Sennett ties developments in western urban life to then contemporary understandings of the body and its processes. For example, he links William Harvey's seventeenth-century discovery of the circulation of blood through the human body with a new focus in urban planning on motion through the city's veins and arteries and the desire to make human movement easy and unobstructed. For Sennett, this impulse to free the human body relates directly to other modern conveniences, like television and automobiles, that end up instead imprisoning the body in a non-sensing bubble.
In fact, Sennett identifies this trend toward ease, comfort and lack of obstruction as one of the primary ramifications of how western cities have developed. For Sennett, ease and comfort pacify the body and desensitize the individual to their connection with others. The individual becomes a self-contained, disconnected unit moving through the city, claiming her right not to be interfered with and, thereby, isolating herself from society as a whole. The individual in this scenario loses her sense of sharing a common interest with the individuals around her. Sennett asserts that western civilization's historical drive toward personal freedom (especially in one's physical life) has actually culminated in passive bodies rather than active ones, in sterile spaces rather than lively ones. These isolated individuals in the modern western city feel, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "strangers to the destinies of each other".
Essentially, difference and human social friction constitute, for Sennett, true freedom; the freedom to act, to work out differences, to really experience the Other. In many ways, Sennett's meditation on the city and bodies is really a plea to reconnect, to tolerate and even invite difference. He writes:
Lurking in the civic problems of the multi-cultural city is the moral difficulty of arousing sympathy for those who are Other. And this can only occur, I believe, by understanding why bodily pain requires a place in which it can be acknowledged, and in which its transcendent origins become visible. Such pain has a trajectory in human experience. It disorients and makes incomplete the self, defeats the desire for coherence; the body accepting pain is ready to become a civic body, sensible to the pain of another person, pains present together on the street, at last endurable - even though, in a diverse world, each person cannot explain what he or she is feeling, who he or she is, to the other. But the body can follow this civic trajectory only if it acknowledges that there is no remedy for its sufferings in the contrivings of society, that its unhappiness has come from elsewhere, that its pain derives from God's command to live together as exiles.
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