Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of ‘Fifty Books for Our Time.’
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.
Table of Content
Foreword, by Paco Underhill
1. Introduction
2. The Social Life of the Street
3. Street People
4. The Skilled Pedestrian
5. The Physical Street
6. The Sensory Street
7. The Design of Spaces
8. Water, Wind, Trees, and Light
9. The Management of Spaces
10. The Undesirables
11. Carrying Capacity
12. Steps and Entrances
13. Concourses and Skyways
14. Megastructures
15. Blank Walls
16. The Rise and Fall of Incentive Zoning
17. Sun and Shadow
18. Bounce Light
19. Sun Easements
20. The Corporate Exodus
21. The Semi-Cities
22. How to Dullify Downtown
23. Tightening Up
24. The Case for Gentrification
25. Return to the Agora
Appendices
A. Digest of Open-Space Zoning Provisions in New York City
B. Mandating of Retailing at Street Level
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
William H. Whyte (1917-1999), author of the bestselling Organization Man, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Princeton. Paco Underhill, founder, CEO, and president of Envirosell, is the author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping and Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping.
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