Public life, labor, action, loneliness, and the fate of the modern world.
Arendt's The Human Condition sits at the foundation of the Forum's thinking about cities, public space, and the political life. She distinguishes labor, work, and action as three modes of human activity — and locates the disappearance of action, and with it the disappearance of public freedom, as one of the deepest losses of modernity.
The book is referenced repeatedly across Council sessions on urban life, technology, democracy, and loneliness. Reading it changes how one sees the questions the Forum asks.
“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”
“To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life.”
“The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true.”
