Can Life Become Better?

“LOSS OF IDENTITY” and “quest for community”—these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America. “Condition” rather than “crisis,” because The Uses of Disorder is not concerned directly with the familiar litany of problems: crime, race, poverty, pollution, housing. Sennett, who teaches sociology at Brandeis University and has been studying carefully the evolution of the 19th-century industrial city into the 20th-century postindustrial metropolis, is of course thoroughly aware of such matters as the failure of urban renewal or the desperate search for revenues to cover city services. But here he is pondering the future of those millions among us who are above the poverty line and beyond the ghetto, of the young people in particular who have rejected suburbia and have been groping toward a new freedom which they associate with an emergent sense of community, possible only in “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities.” If the young are to regain identity, revive community, they must learn to bring “intense family life” out into the neighborhood; they must find a way to mesh centralized authority with decentralized planning; they need to make a virtue of group conflict on a vital, small scale and without violence.

...