Reviews
Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City by Pablo Sendra, Richard Sennett
janthonytucson's review against another edition
4.0
How do we take this from theory to everyday application in the planning and development department and city halls around the country? The ideas laid out here are fantastic, but the hit the real world of local governance. I would love to see a large exposition of these ideas laid out ina. book with several hundreds pages devoted to the governance aspect. As I am in the USA I would prefer the focus be on local issues as most built environment policy is set and implemented at the hyper local level.
a0ri's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
2.5
I found this book to be a bit disappointing. I really had high hopes, but ultimately I found it fell flat for a few reasons
1. Repetitive - if I had to read about "porous walls" and "permeable spaces" one more time I was going to just drop the book. This book feels like it could have been shorter, perhaps even the length of a scientific paper. They also repeatedlt referenced the same 3 or 4 real world examples for every point they made. This brings me to my second grievance
2. Lack of specificity/examples. This book seems much more interested with the philosophy of architecture as opposed to the process. They mention all the ingredients necessary for designing disorder, but they don't really offer a way to implement these, nor do they highlight many real world examples for the reader, who I imagine is also new to this radical concept, to anchor themselves. There are a few drawings in the book, but they are small, somewhat blurry, and hard to follow, particularly as someone without an architectural background. Ultimately, I found that the book proposed these radical ideas without any real method for implementing them.
3. Finally, I think some of the proposals in the book just wouldn't work in practice. A section of this book goes in to the need for individuals to be engaged on the local level with the minutia of public works items like water and electricity. At least in the US I find this to be nigh impossible to enact. Also, the focus on putting power back in the local hands skirts over issues like NIMBYism in the US, which is driven at the local level. It just feels like some of the basic assumptions about how people move through the world run counter to the actuality.
That last point is more a disagreement with the two authors, but I think the first two points will make it hard for anyone without experience/background in urban planning to really follow this bookÂ
1. Repetitive - if I had to read about "porous walls" and "permeable spaces" one more time I was going to just drop the book. This book feels like it could have been shorter, perhaps even the length of a scientific paper. They also repeatedlt referenced the same 3 or 4 real world examples for every point they made. This brings me to my second grievance
2. Lack of specificity/examples. This book seems much more interested with the philosophy of architecture as opposed to the process. They mention all the ingredients necessary for designing disorder, but they don't really offer a way to implement these, nor do they highlight many real world examples for the reader, who I imagine is also new to this radical concept, to anchor themselves. There are a few drawings in the book, but they are small, somewhat blurry, and hard to follow, particularly as someone without an architectural background. Ultimately, I found that the book proposed these radical ideas without any real method for implementing them.
3. Finally, I think some of the proposals in the book just wouldn't work in practice. A section of this book goes in to the need for individuals to be engaged on the local level with the minutia of public works items like water and electricity. At least in the US I find this to be nigh impossible to enact. Also, the focus on putting power back in the local hands skirts over issues like NIMBYism in the US, which is driven at the local level. It just feels like some of the basic assumptions about how people move through the world run counter to the actuality.
That last point is more a disagreement with the two authors, but I think the first two points will make it hard for anyone without experience/background in urban planning to really follow this bookÂ
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