FLESH AND STONE. THE BODY AND THE CITY IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

RICHARD SENNETT´S history of emotions approach: 

" Flesh and Stone is a history of the city told through people´s bodily experience: how women and men moved, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they ate, how they dressed, when they bathed, how they made love in their cities from ancient Athens to modern New York. Through this book takes people´s bodies as a way to understand the past, it is more than an historical catalogue of physical sensations in urban space. Western civilization has had persistent trouble in honoring dignity of the body and diversity of human bodies; I have sought to understand how these body-troubles have been expressed in architecture, in urban design, and in planning practice. 

I was prompted to write this history out of bafflement with a contemporary problem: the sensory deprivation which seems to curse most modern building; the dullness, the monotony, and the tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment. This sensory deprivation is all the more remarkable because modern times have so privileged the sensations of the body and the freedom of physical life. When I first began to explore sensory deprivation in space, the problem seemed a professional failure - modern architects and urbanists having somehow lost an active connection to the human body in their designs. In time I came to see that the problem of sensory deprivation in space has larger causes and deeper historical origins". 


Sennet, Richard ( 1996) , Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York - London: W.W. Norton & Company.