Bridging Theories, William H. Whyte and the Sorcery of Cities

Abstract

William H. Whyte is renowned for his textbook studies of the choreography of people in public space in the 1970s. From a pro-city bias, he focused on personal exchanges in the city centre to verify the benefits of density and intensity. As a public intellectual, he acted as a bridge to stage a rare fusion of urban theories. Using Whyte as model for an operative engagement with theory, the narrative pursued concerns how he zigzagged across intellectual horizons, adopting theories from adjacent fields, which helped unlock prerequisites for an atmosphere of “cityness” forged from the inherently wicked problem of cities; hence sorcery.

Keywords:

• W. H. Whyte
• public space
• urban theory
• cityness
• proximity

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the ongoing generosity of many of Whyte's acquaintances in my research quest and Professor Hugh Campbell for his judicious Ph.D. supervision.

Notes

¹ William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation, 1980), and a film by the same name by the Municipal Art Society of New York (Santa Monica, CA: Direct Cinema Ltd, 1980).

² Joan Copjec, and Michael Sorkin, Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (New York: Verso, 1999), 4.

³ Nathan Glazer, “The Man Who Loved Cities,” Wilson Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 27.

⁴ William Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958); William Whyte, “The Anti-City,” in Man and the Modern City: Ten Essays, edited by Elizabeth Geen, Jeanne R. Lowe, and Kenneth Walker (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 45–58; William Whyte, “The City Eviscerated,” Encounter XL, no. 4 (October 1958): 28–32.

⁵ David Dillon, “The Sage of the City,” Preservation 48, no. 5 (1996): 74.

⁶ From 1961, for every square foot of plaza set-back provided, developers could gain 10 square feet of office space above the zoning allowance. The take-up was universal, prompting Whyte to query the logic and the benefits.

⁷ Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (1974): 44.

⁸ Irwin Altman and Kathleen Christensen, Environment and Behaviour Studies: Emergence of Intellectual Traditions (New York: Plenum Press, 1990), 1; Jonathan Glancey, “City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age,” book review of City, A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith, in The Guardian, 8 June 2012.

⁹ Oxford English Dictionary, accessed online, 8 August 2016.

¹⁰ Neil Brenner, David J. Madden and David Wachsmuth, “Assemblage Urbanism and the Challenges Of Critical Urban Theory,” City 15, no. 2 (2011): 226.

¹¹ The New York City Planning Commission, Plan for New York City, 6 vols., 1969. Whyte was copywriter and conceptual driver of the content and presentation of vol. 1, Critical Issues.

¹² Hilary Ballon, “The Physical City,” in Sam Roberts, America’s Mayor, John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 134.

¹³ Jan Gehl, interview with author, 15 July 2009.

¹⁴ Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine De Gruyter, 1998), 208.

¹⁵ Whyte, “The Anti-City,” 45.

¹⁶ Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” Architectural Design 4 (1978), 267–78.

¹⁷ William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 4.

¹⁸ John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American 306 (1962): 139–48. Calhoun’s theories were also criticized by Edward T. Hall in his The Hidden Dimension: Man’s Use of Space in Public and Private (London: Bodley Head, 1969), 24–29.

¹⁹ Calhoun, "Population Density and Social Pathology,” 139–48.

²⁰ To fuel his anti-urban fervour, Calhoun had even created miniature cities for his rats to model and mimic the urban world. Discussed in C. Fisher, M. Baldassare, and R. Ofshe, “Crowding Studies and Urban Life: A Critical Review,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 41 (1975): 415.

²¹ Robert Sommer, Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Hall, The Hidden Dimension, op.cit.

²² Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 120.

²³ Ibid., 31.

²⁴ William H. Whyte, A Comparative Study of Street Life, Tokyo, Manila, New York (Tokyo: Research Institute for Oriental Cultures, Gakushuin University, 1978), 2.

²⁵ In his study of the new town of Forest Hills for his best-selling The Organization Man, Whyte examined how social patterns formed between neighbours and concluded that physical proximity was conducive to “fraternization”: “The location of your home in relation to others not only determines your closest friends; it also determines how popular you will be. The more central one’s location, the more social contacts one has.” Whyte cited similar findings on how physical design matters to social relations from research by Leon Feininger on “Propinquity” from 1950 (Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 346).

²⁶ Quote from keynote address by Whyte to his school, St Andrew’s Delaware, on the benefits of close living at this boarding school.

²⁷ Interestingly in the context of sorcery, Merton adopted the stage name “Merlin,” a magician.

²⁸ Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Geertz credits Gilbert Ryle for coining the term. Also discussed in John Rennie Short’s Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment (London: Macmillan, 2014), 3.

²⁹ Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View,” 26–45.

³⁰ Ibid., 43.

³¹ Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 39. See also Craig Calhoun, Robert K. Merton, Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.

³² Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 49.

³³ Archival note delivered by Whyte at a keynote address to his school, St Andrew’s Delaware, on the benefits of close living at this boarding school.

³⁴ William H. Whyte, The Essential William Whyte, ed. Albert LaFarge (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 118.

³⁵ Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Science 4 (1973): 155–69.

³⁶ Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 4.

³⁷ Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (London: Harper Collins, 2002), xi.

³⁸ Charles E. Little, “Holly Whyte’s Journalism of Place,” in The Humane Metropolis, ed. Platt Rutherford (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 34.

³⁹ Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

⁴⁰ Christine M. Boyer, CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 10; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 19–35.

⁴¹ Saskia Sassen, “The City: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects,” Art Journal 60, no. 2, College Art Association (summer 2001): 12–20.

⁴² Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 4.

⁴³ Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives (London: Halvin Press, 1998), 85.

⁴⁴ Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center, 130–31. Also discussed recently in Glancey, “City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age”.