By William H. Whyte, Paco Underhill
(Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2009); 978-0812220742
For
sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major
cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he
conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city
dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a
humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban
environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte
uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion.
Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so
fast—and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the
busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the
pedestrian traffic stream? Why do places designed primarily for security
actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing?
"The city is
full of vexations," Whyte avers: "Steps too steep; doors too tough to
open; ledges you cannot sit on. . . . It is difficult to design an urban space
so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces."
Yet Whyte finds encouragement in the widespread rediscovery of the city center.
The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek
agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where
people come together face-to-face.