1 Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life―how women and men moved in public

and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate,
how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love―all in the architecture of stone and
space from ancient Athens to modern New York.

Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians
experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its
troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome
in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the
body.

The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the
Christian city―the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and
Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body
cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly
evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of
bodies that make up the modern city.

2 Richard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of
material facts -- about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on
how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles
society may put in their way.

an expansive history of Western civilization's evolving conception of the human body and
that concept's influence on the erection of cities. Sennett (Sociology/New York Univ.; The
Conscience of the Eye, 1991, etc.) argues that the homogenization of contemporary culture
is aided and abetted by the failure of modern architecture and urban planning to
accommodate the physical and sensory needs of the human body. This is more than mere
postmodern sterility to Sennett. He sees this failing as an extension of the ``enduring
problem'' of Western civilization: the inability or refusal of those with the power to build cities
to honor ``the dignity of the body and diversity of human bodies.'' From Pericles' Athens to
Robert Moses's New York, Sennett incorporates discussions of sexuality, religion, politics,
medicine, and economics into a historical grand tour of great cities whose buildings, streets,
and public squares elevated the status of the ruling elite and diminished that of common
citizens. Along the way, we find out how it felt to witness an execution by guillotine in
revolutionary Paris, attend a Roman banquet, and observe a trial in ancient Greece, where
courtrooms reflected the demands of a participatory democracy—three-foot-high walls and a
jury box big enough for the minimum 201 jurors. Though Sennett ably surveys the
ideological landscapes of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, these quotidian
revelations are what enliven the book. By exposing the principles of individualism and
personal comfort that form the most fundamental assumptions of 20th-century consumer
culture, Sennett reminds modern readers that they trade a great deal for comfort—namely
their engagement with one another. In so doing, he debunks the myth that the evolution of
cities has been one of unfettered progress, or that progress is synonymous with
improvement. Passionate, exhaustively researched, and original.
3 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."
4 Sennett looks at cities in the classic sense, and argues that they have produced urban
landscapes based on society’s ideas of how human bodies should function. He begins in Athens,
whose idea of bodies were that they were training grounds for tightening skins and sexuality as a
form of dominance in social structures, before moving to the Roman’s construction of Pantheon
and Coliseum in understanding that death and destruction were parts of life. He then moves to
the body as a holy object to be understood in medieval Paris, then to Venice’s Jewish ghetto,
where Jewish people were to be contained or else they would infect the rest of the population. In
the early stages of capitalism, cities began small impulses to clean themselves, as urban planners
and designers called them veins and arteries in common 17th-18th century literature, which
reflected in the thought that freely circulating blood promoted good health in the body.
Revolutionary Paris and Industrial London brought the city as a place of bodies in motion to a
place in motion. London became an urban individualism which transcended to modern New
York. Sennett’s overall argument is that modern capitalism and mass media have made bodies
passive and receptive as opposed to the urban past of constant motion. Those twin institutions
achieved what the state and religion could not in the past.

Key Themes and Concepts

-Cities were built around ideas of how the body related to society.
-Cities reflect the values of the societies that produce them, and develop as such.
-Control over gendered bodies, or moves towards gender equality, also are reflected in cities.
1 introduction (wider context)

-1500 theoretical

-an argument for resistance

2 history

-french revolution

3 XR

-aims

-strategy

-some other states/ places didn’t get much media exposure

-strategic positioning

-base houses raided