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March 13, 2006

"City: Rediscovering The Center"

I just finished a wonderful book on urban planning, urban spaces, and the urban dwellers who use (or fail to use) them. It's called "City: Rediscovering The Center" and it's by William Whyte ("The Organization Man").

If you have any interest in cities and how they really function, I can't recommend it more highly. It goes on the list with Jane Jacobs' "The Death And Life Of Great American Cities."

The Whyte book is a study of how people behave in cities - where they congregate, how they interact with one another, how they loiter, shop, walk, and drive. Whyte used cameras (both still and high-speed) to record people as they went about their business at intersections and on sidewalks, charting out areas of the city that succeed and pointing out those that fail. I think everyone has seen Parks That Work (full of people laughing, children playing and so on) as well as Parks That Don't ("unsafe", full of drug dealers or the homeless) - if you've ever wondered why this happens, Whyte's got some great explanations.

One example of a critical planning factor concerns the widths of sidewalks - they need to be wide enough to allow traffic flow around trash cans, hot dog vendors, newsmen and the like, but not so wide that they create vacuum. Turns out that crowding is actually a desirable feature of sidewalks - they give vibrancy, attract more people, and thus make a place magnetic for pedestrians:

The most dramatic contraction in walking width was in Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. The venerable old building was a given, and because of the placement of the pillars, the main walkway could only be eleven feet wide. Developer James Rouse and architects Jane and Ben Thompson thought the very narrowness could prove a virtue. So it has. The walking of it is an experience and it has attracted one of the heaviest pedestrian flows of any marketplace in the country. You edge past food displays, detour around knots of people sampling the food, and past all sorts of smells and sounds. You are crowded, no mistake, but it a free-choice crowding and very tolerable.

The book is an ode to urban life and what makes it worth living; just reading it makes you fall in love with your city all over again. Check it out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at March 13, 2006 11:14 PM. Posted to Entertainment | Politics.

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