William Whyte

William Hollingsworth Whyte was an editor at Fortune magazine, where he published in 1956 The Organization Man, a portrait of post-war corporate conformity that sold millions of copies, and where in 1958 he commissioned an unknown Jane Jacobs to write the article that would become The Death and Life of Great American Cities. From 1969, with the Street Life Project, he devoted the rest of his life to a simple question: what do people do in New York's plazas and why.

His method was to film in time-lapse for years and count. The conclusions, published in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) and in the film of the same title, are the manual of public space: people sit where there are places to sit; the best places have sun, trees, water, food and contact with the street; the corner is the liveliest spot; what attracts people most is other people, and a musician or a sculpture makes two strangers talk to each other, which he called triangulation.

His findings changed New York's 1975 zoning on privately owned public plazas, which since then must have seating and trees, and inspired the creation of Project for Public Spaces by his collaborator Fred Kent. City: Rediscovering the Center (1988) sums up three decades of observation and defends density and the street against the suburb. He died in 1999; Jan Gehl and the whole urbanism of observation descend from him.