The Architecture of Cooperation

Updated 18 July 2016

Richard Sennett delivered the lecture (see video below), "The Architecture of Cooperation" which addresses a question: how can we design spaces in the city which encourage strangers to cooperate?

A democracy supposes people can consider views other than their own. This was Aristotle's notion in the Politics. He thought the awareness of difference occurs only in cities, since the very city is formed by synoikismos, a drawing together of different families and tribes, of competing economic interests, of natives with foreigners. 'Difference' today seems to be about identity - we think of race, gender, or class. Aristode meant something more by difference; he included also the experience of doing different things, of acting in divergent ways which do not nearly fit together. The mixture in a city of action as well as identity is the foundation of its distinctive politics. Aristotle's hope was that when a person becomes accustomed to a diverse, complex milieu, he or she will cease reacting violently when challenged by something strange or contrary. Instead, this environment should create an oudook favorable to discussion of differing views or conflicting interests. The agora was the place in the city where this oudook should be formed.

Almost all modern urban planners subscribe to this Aristotelian principle. But if in the same space different persons or activities are merely concentrated, but each remains isolated and segregated, diversity loses its force. Differences have to interact. The Athenian agora made differences among male citizens interact in two ways. First, in the open space of the agora there were few visual barriers between events occurring at the same time, so that men did not experience physical compartmentalization. As a result, in coming to the town square to deal with a banker, a citizen might be suddenly caught up in a trial in the law court, shouting out his own opinion or simply taking in an unexpected problem. Secondly, the agora established a space for stepping back from engagement. This occurred at the edge, just under the roof of the stoa on its open side; here was a fluid, liminal zone of transition between private and public.

These two principles of visual design - lack of visual barriers but a well-defmed zone of transition between public and private- shaped people's experience of language. The flow of speech was less continuous and singular than in the Pnyx. In the agora, communication through words became more fragmentary, as people moved from one scene to another. The operations of the eye were correspondingly more active and varied in the agora than in the Pnyx. A person standing under the stoa roof looked out, his eye searching, scanning. In the Pnyx the eye was fixed on a single scene, that of the orator standing at the bema. At most, the observer scanned the reactions of people sitting elsewhere, fixed in their seats.

This ancient example illustrates how the making of theaters and town squares can be put to democratic use. The theater organizes the sustained attention required for decision-making; the square is a school for the often fragmentary, confusing experience of diversity. The square prepares people for debate; the theater visually disciplines their debating.

This is, of course, in principle. Throughout their long history, these two urban forms have been put to many divergent or contrary uses. We need only think of the Nazi spectacles in Germany to summon an image of theatrically-focused attention dedicated to totalitarian ends. The disorders of 19th century Parisian squares frequently drove people further inside themselves rather than made citizens more attentive to each other.

The Open City:

The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society's divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in.

Cities fail on all these counts due to government policies, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. The city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. Perhaps those nice words -- clean, safe, efficient, dynamic – are not enough in themselves to confront critically our masters.

In this talk, I’d like to propose we look at the city in a more embracing way. Currently, we make cities into closed systems. To make them better, we should make them into open systems. We need to applying ideas about open systems currently animating the sciences to animate our understanding of the city. More, in an open city, whatever virtues of efficiency, safety, or sociability people achieve, they achieve by virtue of their own agency. But just because a city brings together people who differ by class, ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference, in an open system, the city is to a degree incoherent. Dissonance marks the open way of life more than coherence, yet it is a dissonance for which people take ownership.