The New Statesman Essay - Cities without care or connection  New
capitalism is destroying the richness of urban life, argues
Richard Sennett  Cities can be badly run, crime-infested, dirty
and decaying. Yet many people think it worth living even in the
worst of them. Why? Because, I would suggest, they have the
potential to make us more complex human beings.  A city is a
place where people can learn to live with strangers, to enter
into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness
stultifies the mind; diversity stimulates and expands it. The
city can thus allow people to develop a richer, more complex
sense of themselves. They are not just bankers or road-sweepers,
Asians or Anglo-Saxons, speakers of English or of Spanish,
bourgeois or proletarian: they can be some or all of these
things, and more. They are not subject to a fixed,
classificatory scheme of identity. People can develop multiple
images of their identities, knowing that who they are shifts
depending upon whom they are with.  This i