The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - 1979

William H. Whyte (1917-1999) captured vast public attention in 1956 with the book The Organization Man: a provocative analysis of American society and of a new ethic inside big industries. At the beginning of the 70's, Mr. Whyte met the president of The City Planning Commission of New York City, Mr. Donald Elliott. They discussed the question of urban public spaces. From that moment, Mr. Whyte started to look at the cities and at its life. In 1972 he has established The Street Life Project [1] with the aim to find out, beginning from the direct observation of human behavior, what determinates the quality of urban spaces.
In the first phase of the research, The Street Life Project studied playgrounds and parks of New York; in a second phase, Mr. Whyte had the possibility to extend his studies to other American cities and even to the far Tokyo. At the end, he noticed that there is a likeness in the behavior of people that live in city of same proportions.
Mr. Whyte thought that this observation work would last at least a couple of years, but the continuous inflow of new informations, stimulus and questions as well as the need to study those informations in depth, brought to 25 the total number of years dedicated to the observation and to the elaboration of data.
 

In 1980 have been published, as a product of this diligent work, both a book and a film. The book, "The social life of small urban spaces", wants to be a manual for the creation and management of urban spaces, referring in particular to the city of New York. In fact, New York City derived from Whyte's conclusions useful principles for the creation of those spaces. The film, which has the same name as the book and which follows book's structure, is a montage of the sequences that were filmed by the Street Life Project's stuff. Whyte's conclusions are in fact inseparable from the equipment he used: time laps cameras for sequences of distant observation, and 8 mm cameras for street observations. Those time laps cameras were positioned in strategic city points and the filmed material was compared with the material collected by writing notes, interviewing people, drawing diagrams, taking pictures, measuring urban elements, Mr. Whyte concluded that the most used plazas and the most successful too, are those that allow people to socialize and to feel comfortable. Just like, for example, the Seagram Plaza in New York. But how can we obtain those conditions? In spite of the initial convictions of The Street Life Project, what seems to attract people most to a place more than the sun, than the aesthetic or than the form, are: the presence of other people, sittable places and the presence in those places of restaurants, cafés, bars etc. "Food attracts people who attract other people", Mr. Whyte said [2] Benches or ledges where pedestrians can find relief, become catalysts only if their height and narrowness are appropriately dimensioned. The ideal would be to win the lack of trust in people and provide plazas with movable chairs. In this way, users would have absolute freedom when deciding where to sit.

In order to realize a good plaza, there should be an attractive street, too. The binomial street-plaza is as much successful as less we can feel the line where the first finishes and the second begins. This condition is easy to obtain: there should be no stairs or doors, or other limit markers. Thanks to the film, Whyte realizes that the construction of mega structures has as its consequence the emptying of the streets. Day by day, more and more activities become confined inside great buildings on many different levels. These places usually provoke confusion and deny to the street its intrinsic value. At the end, those places become fortresses, closed towards the life on the street. Galleries, atriums and courtyards should be treated with the same attention and should have the same attractions as plazas should have, if we want them to work well.

One of the greatest preoccupations of public administrations is to keep far away from the public spaces the "undesirables". This fear makes them multiply the number of policemen to solve the situation. But the film shows us and we can even read it in statistics that it would be enough to encourage the use of the place and to increase the number of users. In this way, users would unconsciously keep the situation under control over the place in question. Nevertheless, without police's presence, plaza's life would become nicer and habitable. Mr. Whyte said even that people have a certain capacity to understand when there are too many people in a place. This characteristic makes them use the space in the right number, just feeling when there is too much. Another useful mechanism for the life in on street is what Mr. Whyte call "triangulation". This is what happens when an extraordinary factor becomes reason to talk with someone who is standing nearby. In these occasions, people feel like they know each other. Those are important moments for the social life in urban cities. At the end, there is no utopian tone in The Street Life Project's conclusions. Beginning with the observation of human behavior and through the good sense, this book and, even more, the film, represent today homage to the cities as structures in evolution to which we should give or give again a human measure. The Street Life Project continues even today the work started by Whyte using his methods and principles. 

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[1] The first members of The Street Life Project were: Fred Kent (today president of The Public Places Society), Marylin Russel, Nancy Linday, Ellen Asher, Margaret Bemiss, Ann Herendeen e Elizabeth Dietel.
[2] "The social life of small urban places"; William H. Whyte; Conservation foundation; Washington 1980