The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, by William H. Whyte

Note: This book was long out of print but has now been reissued by the Project for Public Spaces, New York, and is available directly through their web site.

This is a little gem of a book by the author of the iconic The Organization Man. It’s analogous to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but where the latter focuses primarily on residential/neighborhood fabric, this book is a well-observed set of essays focused on how indoor and outdoor urban public spaces are effectively used by the public (or not).

Like Jacobs, Whyte observes public behavior at a variety of actual indoor and outdoor spaces (the book was published in 1980) and tries to draw inferences about why some spaces work better than others, which could then be used as design guidelines when creating new spaces.

Some of the observations from those who have written about suburbanization are repeated here, such as the ineffectiveness of buildings that present an unfriendly face to the public (solid wall, tinted windows, etc., essentially a firewall between the interior and exterior.

One difference worth keeping in mind is that developers of commercial projects must provide a certain amount of public space as part of a deal to build something, or are incentivized to do so in exchange for being allowed to build more revenue-generating square footage or add height. So there’s a built in opportunity as a side-effect of commercial development to get this right (or wrong).

What makes outdoor spaces work?

People are attracted most by the presence of other people (the “self-congestion” effect) and visible activity. So the question is how to bootstrap that positive feedback loop. Much of the advice focuses on how to at least not thwart it.

  • Places to sit. Sometimes, planters and berms can become unintentional places to sit. Chairs work best when they’re not fixed to the ground – despite the fact that in places with freely-movable chairs, few people move them more than a foor or so, if at all. However, architects and planners often deliberately make surfaces bad for sitting (wrong height, “decorative” iron spikes or grillwork, etc.) to prevent “undesirables” from using them. Yet as Jacobs and others have observed, the most effective way to achieve that is to have enough “desirable” people using the space: “undesirables” tend to occupy the places no one else wants to occupy. (Also, it’s debatable whether a place designed to filter its occupants is truly a “public” space.) Even stairs can attract sitters, as long as they don’t completely block the access function of the steps. In those cases, people tend to congregate near corners, where they can sit face to face rather than strictly side by side.

  • Sun, grass, trees; and the relative absence of wind. Even reflected sunlight (e.g. off the side of a glass building) is better than none, and having trees for shade allows the space to be appealing even when the sun is more intense. And the draft effects of wind drafting between tall closely-packed buildings can make an otherwise pleasant space unusable.

  • Food. If food is not built into the space, at least don’t chase away food that appears there, such as food trucks, vendor carts, etc. Food tends to attract people, which attracts more food, etc.

  • Entertainers. Even bad entertainers are good, because the act of watching entertainment is itself social and encourages social interaction, which tends to draw more people, which encourages more social interaction, etc.

  • Other things being equal, it’s more of a challenge for smaller cities to “compress” their downtowns because they have fewer people overall, so they need to compress relatively more. The large and showy plazas that often result from “revitalizing” small cities’ downtowns can look sad and deserted as a result, which (surprise) doesn’t attract people to come there.

What makes indoor spaces work?

** Self-congestion for doors. **

Some of my favorite quotes

  • Regarding the repurposing of an existing historic building or oddly-shaped parcel of land: “Architects and planners like a blank slate. They usually do their best work, however, when they don’t have one. When they have to work with impossible lot lines and bits and pieces of space, beloved old eyesores, irrational street layouts, and other such constraints, they frequently produce the best of their new designs– and the most neighborly.” (p.93)

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