The Editor's Pick: Video of Richard Sennett's lecture at Harvard GSD, and tweets on Michel Wieviorka, Ash Amin, and Richard Sennett

Another video for today: The Architecture of Cooperation lectured by urban sociologist Richard Sennett at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This lecture was programmed on February 28th, 2012. For those of you who, like me, had not this chance to attend his lecture, this is a great opportunity, if you have an interest in urban sociology.

Before jumping on this video, Richard Sennett participated as respondent in a lecture of French sociologist Michel Wieviorka and Ash Amin entitled The Return of Subject, yesterday at LSE Cities. I will post some tweets that Joshua Simoneau and LSE Cities shared with us via twitter. It is not the entire lecture but it gives us an outline of this lecture. These tweets will be posted right below this video.

Back to the video. This event is described as follows:

The theme of the lecture addresses a question: how can we design spaces in the city which encourage strangers to cooperate? To explore this question, I'll draw on research in the social sciences about cooperation, based on my book, and relate this research to current issues in urban design.

Now yesterday, a lecture entitled The Return of the subject with participation of Michel Wieviorka and Ash Amin, and respondents Richard Sennett, Claire Alexander at the LSE Cities that I followed via twitter. Below, LSE Cities's presentation of this lecture:

This event will launch two new books on the society of strangers discussing issues of hyper-subjectivity and desubjectification as the causes of contemporary escalations of violence. Ash Amin's Land of Strangers offers a diagnosis of attitudes towards the stranger in the West after 9/11, while Michel Wieviorka's Evil develops a sociological analysis of evil phenomena presenting us with a fresh approach to the understanding of the darker regions of human behaviour. Both authours will be joined by Claire Alexander and Richard Sennett to discuss the analytical challenges posed by the return of the Subject, and the nature of a politics of solidarity.

Tweets are what they are, short, concise, often incomplete. Context is needed as many of these tweets appears to be vague especially if one did not have the chance to attend the lecture. But we must do with it:

" When you destroy a building, you can repair; you can't if you destroy a person", Michel Wieviorka in response to question on violence and ethics.
"Cities relive us to our innocence. It's why American don't like cities." Richard Sennett
"Violence is so immoral it destroys." Michel Wieviorka
"Urban evil? Some of the worst evils in history are in fact not urban." Michel Wieviorka
"Most people who vote for NF [National Front] in France live outside cities. The evil doesn't live in the city" Michel Wieviorka to Richard Sennett
"Ethics is not connected with cultural values (abstract). Morals are connected with values." Michel Wieviorka
"Social sciences cannot advise politicians. It just doesn't work, as much as we want it to." Michel Wieviorka
"Social science is useful, but it can't be directly useful to politicians" Michel Wieviorka to Claire Alexander
"Ash Amin's book looks at everyday practice of displacement when [Simmel's] stranger arrives in the city" tweeted by LSE Cities
"We live in a time of hyper-subjectivity" Ash Amin
"Is there something that constitutes urban evil?" Richard Sennett to Michel Wieviorka
"Maybe We should use desubjectification to understand dark matters like racism and violence" Michel Wieviorka
"Europe witnesses a transformation from provincialism to catastrophe in race politics" Ash Amin