By the year 2050, two-thirds of all people will live in cities. How can residents with different cultural and religious backgrounds coexist peacefully? Richard Sennett raises the question of the relationship between urban planning and everyday life: How has it changed historically? What might an open city look like, characterized by diversity and change, where residents develop skills to cope with uncertainties? Richard Sennett demonstrates why we need an urbanism that includes and assumes close collaboration between planners and residents, and that a city full of contradictions does not constrain urban experience but enriches it.