mall| The Power of Observation

,MBT Kimondo
“There is a rash of studies underway designed to disclose the bad consequences of overcrowding. This is all very well as far as it works, but it merely goes in one direction. What about undercrowding? The researchers would be a lot more objective if they paid as many consideration to the possible effects on people of relating solitude and lack of propinquity. Maybe some of those rats they study obtain solitary too.”
Perspectives
The Social Life of Public Spaces
PPS author and chancellor Fred Kent worked as one of Whyte’s research assistants on the Street Life Project, conducting observations and movie analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City. When Kent founded PPS shortly thereafter, he based the organization largely on Whyte’s usages and discoveries. More than everything, Whyte believed in the perseverance and sanctity of public spaces. For him, small urban places are “priceless,” and the city street is “the creek of life…where we come together.” Whyte’s ideas are as relevant today as they were over 30 years ago, and perhaps even more so.
The Last Landscape, Garden City: Doubleday, 1968.
City: Rediscovering the Center, New York: Doubleday, 1988.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Washington, D.C.: The Conservation Foundation, 1980.
Contact
“Writer Delved Into ‘Obvious’ Quirks of Life”, America Today, January 14, 1999, p3a.
“Secret Life of US Corporations: William H. Whyte”, The Guardian (London), January 15, 1999, p.20.
The Essential William H. Whyte, Albert Lafarge (Editor), Fordham University Press, 2000.
“The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the heart.”
Biography
“Up to seven people per foot of walkway a minute is a pleasing bustle”
“I end then in compliment of small spaces. The multiplier effect is tremendous. It is not fair the digit of people using them, but the larger digit who pass by and enjoy them vicariously, or even the larger digit who feel better about the downtown for knowledge of them. For a city, such places are expensive, however the spend. They are built of a set of basics and they are right in front of our snouts. If we will look.”
obit. Time, January 25, 1999, p.23.
Quotable
Publications
Books
obit. The Daily Telegraph (London), January 15, 1999, p.25.
“Lessons From ‘The Organization Man’ Still Have Some Relevance for Today”, Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1999, p.c5.
“It is laborious to design a space that ambition not attract people. What is noteworthy is how often this has been realized.”
Cluster Development,Dwyane Wade Shoes, New York: American Conservation Foundation, 1964.
All told, Whyte waded the city streets for more than 16 annuals. As unobtrusively as likely, he watched people and used time-lapse photography to draft the meanderings of pedestrians. What appeared via his intuitive thinking is an extremely person, often amusing outlook of what is staggeringly apparent about people’s behavior in public spaces, yet seemingly invisible to the inobservant.
Articles
– Paul Goldberger, Architecture
“Holly all believed namely the greatest lesson the metropolis has apt offer us namely the idea namely we are all in it attach, for better or for worse, and we have to make it work.”
The gist of Whyte’s work was predicated on the years he spent instantly observing human beings, and he authored several texts about urban planning and design and human behavior in manifold urban spaces. Whyte served as an advisor to Laurence S. Rockefeller on environmental issues and as a opener planning adviser for major U.S. cities, traveling and lecturing warmhearted. He was a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He was a trustee of the American Conservation Association, and was athletic in the Municipal Art Society, the Hudson River Valley Commission and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Task Force on Natural Beauty.
Whyte was connate in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917. He added the staff of Fortune magazine in 1946, later graduating from Princeton University and serving in the Marine Corps. His book The Organization Man (1956), based on his treatises about corporate mores and the suburban middle level, sold more than two million copies. Whyte then cornered to the topics of sprawl and urban recovery, and began a differentiated profession as a sage of sane evolution and an advocate of cities.
The Power of Observation
“The human backside is a dimension architects appear to have forgotten.”
“Whyte’s work remains a living and usable manual for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives.”
“Securing Open Space as Urban America: Conservation Easements,” Technical Bulletin No. 36, Urban Land Institute, Washington, D.C., September 1968.
Whyte wrote that the social life in public spaces contributes fundamentally to the quality of life of individuals and society. He suggested that we have a moral liability to establish physical places that facilitate municipal appointment and community interaction.
The Exploding Metropolis, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
Biography • Perspectives • Quotable • Publications • Contact
Obituaries
In 1969 Whyte aided the New York City Planning Commission in drafting a comprehensive intend for the city. Having been critically involved in the planning of current city spaces, he came to surprise how these spaces were really working out. No 1 had researched this ahead. He applied for and received a grant to study the street life in New York and other cities in what became known as the Street Life Project. With a group of youth research assistants, and camera and laptop in hand, he conducted pioneering studies above walker behavior and discovery research on city dynamics.
“What attracts people maximum, it would emerge, is other people.”
“We are not hapless creatures caught in the grasp of forces we can do tiny about, and wholesale damnations of our society only loan a further mystique to union. Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man.”
Whyte advocated for a new direction of designing public spaces – one that was bottom-up, not top-down. Using his reach, chart ought start with a thorough comprehending of the path folk use spaces, and the path they would like to use spaces. Whyte eminent that people poll with their feet – they use spaces that are effortless to use, that are cozy. They don’t use the spaces that are not.
Bottom-Up Place Design
obit. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 17, 1999, p.e5.
info@pps.org
obit. The Independent (London), January 15, 1999, p.7.
“The Gifted Pedestrian,” Ekistics, 303, May/June 1984.
obit. U.S. News & World Report, January 25, 1999, p.16.
“One felicity leads to distinct. Good places tend to be all of a piece – and the cause can virtually always be traced to a human being.”
“Dialogue: “How Has ‘The Organization Man’ Aged? Nostalgia’s Illusions”, by Virgina Postrel and “How Has ‘The Organization Man Aged? A Need to Belong”, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, both in The New York Times, January 17, 1999, p.17.
William H.(Holly) Whyte (1917-1999) is considered the director for Project for Public Spaces for of his seminal work in the study of human behavior in urban settings. While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to wonder how newly planned city spaces were actually working out – someone that no one had previously researched. This curiosity led to the Street Life Project, a pioneering study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics.
“William Whye Dies: Urban Studies Author, Best Known for ‘The Organization Man’”, The Washington Post, January 14, 1999, p.b06.
The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.
Plan for the City of New York, 1969.
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– Nathan Glazer, Wilson Quarterly
“So-called ‘undesirables’ are not the problem. It is the fathom taken to battle them that is the problem?”
“William Whyte, Man of the Mid-Century”, The Washington Post, January 18, 1999, p.c02.
“If there’s a lesson in streetwatching it is that people do like basics — and as contexts go, a street that is open to the sky and filled with people and life is a splendid place to be.”
“A Guide to Peoplewatching,” in Urban Open Spaces, Lisa Taylor (Ed.), New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979.
Whyte suggested that through detection and by talking to people, we can learn a large handle about what people want in public spaces and can put this perception to work in creating locations that fashion livable communities. We should accordingly enter spaces without academic or aesthetical prejudices, and “look hard, with a wash, remove mind, and then see repeatedly – and believe what you watch.”