Richard Sennett

Climate Change in Cities: A Problem in Urban Ethics, a lecture by Richard Sennett with response by Weiping Wu, Director of the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP.

Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett writes on cities, labor and culture. He received the Centennial Medal from Harvard University in 2017 and was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the Queen of England in recognition of his service to the United Kingdom in 2018. He has taught Sociology and Urban Studies at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and New York University. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and currently Chair of Theatrum Mundi, a London based non-profit working to improve the understanding of cities through education and research. Facilitating collaboration with artists and city-makers — architects, planners, engineers, and urbanists — to impact critical approaches to the way their crafts shape the public life of cities. He is an adviser to UNESCO, on climate change and urban development in the 21st century.

His most recent book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, published in 2018, traces how cities are built and how people live in them from ancient times to now. He draws on his deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities. He has published more than 20 volumes including several novels and sociological texts, most notably The Craftsman, The Fall of Public Man, and The Corrosion of Character.

Free and open to the public. Organized by Columbia GSAPP.