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William H. Whyte
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (1917- January 12, 1999) was an American sociologist, journalist, and peoplewatcher.
Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917 and died in New York City in 1999. An early graduate of St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, he graduated from Princeton University and then served in Marine Corps. In 1946 he joined Fortune magazine.
Whyte wrote a 1956 bestseller titled The Organization Man after Fortune Magazine sponsored him to do extensive interviews on the CEOs of corporations such as General Electric and Ford.
While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to use direct observation to describe behavior in urban settings. With young research assistants wielding still cameras, movie cameras, and notebooks, Whyte described and measured the substance of urban public life, such as jaywalking and 'schmoozing patterns', in a way that nobody had thought to do before.
These observations developed into the "Street Life Project", an ongoing study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, and eventually to Whyte's book called "City: Rediscovering the Center" (1988), an elegant, knowledgeable and subversive guide to human behavior in Manhattan. For architects and urban planners, Whyte's work demonstrates, unarguably, what works and what doesn't.
Whyte also worked closely with the renovation of Bryant Park in New York City. He was the author of the restoration plan for Bryant Park in 1980, and contributed to the design of the modern Bryant Park.
Whyte served as mentor to many, including the urban-planning writer Jane Jacobs, Paco Underhill, who has applied this technique to improving retail environments, Dan Biederman of Bryant Park Corporation, who led the renovation of Bryant Park and the Business Improvement District movement in New York City, and Fred Kent, head of the Project for Public Spaces.
Other books include: "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" and "City: Rediscovering the Center"