AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 9Busy StreetsContrary to Previous Reports, Cities Are Not Dead What keeps them alive, says William H. Whyte, is the crowdBy Sam Allis
Urban thinker William H. Whyte has read endless obituaries
of the American city. He has heard it called everything from
"an ecological smear" to a "behavioral sink." The future, he has
been told, is elsewhere: in the suburbs, the country, anywhere
but the city. Nonsense, says Whyte. "The core of the city has
held. It has not gone to hell." What is more, he argues, "the
city remains a magnificent place to do business, and that is
part of the rediscovery of the center. While we are losing a lot
of functions that we used to enjoy, we are intensifying the most
important function of all -- a place for coming together."
"Holly" Whyte, an irrepressible 71, has been lobbing
potshots at purveyors of conventional wisdom about cities for
more than 20 years. He started making waves in 1956 with his
bestseller The Organization Man, one of the first exposes of the
emptiness of corporate life. In 1974 the National Geographic
Society awarded him its first domestic expedition grant to
pursue his urban sleuthing.
In his latest book, City, Whyte continues to challenge
orthodox urban planning. For one thing, he likes free-floating
city congestion. He maintains that gentrification gets a bum rap
and that the corporate exodus to the suburbs is stupid. He
advocates narrower streets for cars and wider sidewalks for
people. Forget exits, he says, it's time to make better doors.
The revolving ones at the bottom of most office towers may save
energy, but they are hopelessly inefficient at moving people.
Cram as many stores as possible along the streets to bring them
alive. Do away with skywalks, abolish sunken plazas and tear
down walls in front of parks and playgrounds, because they all
increase isolation from the city experience.
Whyte puts his faith in something he calls "the impulse of
the center," which animates his vision of the teeming urban
core. "You see it at cocktail parties," he says, "the phenomenon
where people move toward the center. It is an instinct to be in
a position of maximum choice."
On the other hand, Whyte contends, the heralded corporate
exodus to the suburbs has produced minimal choice. "The new
suburban headquarters," he declares, "say, `By God, if those
bastards from New York come and try to storm our ramparts,
we'll pour boiling water on them.'" He claims these suburban
offices are such lonely places that consultants have to be
imported as visitors. "One guy said, `You've missed an important
point. It is true no one comes out to see us. But when we go
into town, we're much more careful, and we schedule ourselves
much more efficiently than otherwise would be the case.' He
proceeded to sketch out a formula for cutting yourself off from
any unplanned encounter." And the unplanned encounter, Whyte
concludes, is one of the joys of urban life: "You hear the point
you didn't expect to hear."
Whyte has detected what may be a selfish motive behind the
suburban corporate shift. He tracked 38 companies that left New
York City over a ten-year period and discovered that 31 of them
had relocated to within eight miles of the home of their chief
executive officer. "I take that at face value," he says deadpan.
To Whyte, volume is life. That is why he is convinced that
the street corner remains the best meeting place in the world:
"A downtown, if it is any damned good, ought to be able to put
out on the street more than 1,000 people an hour. What you want
to do is maximize street activity," he continues. "Your life is
on the street. A lively street has many entrances and exits.
It's like a stage set. This is one of the reasons why there
shouldn't be blank walls. Stores need all the competition they
can get. I don't know if that sounds funny, but one of the
problems with some pedestrian malls is that they don't have
enough people to really make the thing work."
He is stunned by the attitudes of officials in cities like
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where a skywalk system saps the foot
traffic from the streets below, which are already threatened by
nearby malls. "When they tell me that they are really going to
curb their pedestrian congestion, I can hardly believe my ears,"
Whyte says. "The thing to worry about is not enough people."
Not all congestion is good, he cautions. Choice is
paramount. "On a bus or a subway, you are trapped," Whyte says
about the bad kind. "But in a free-choice situation, carrying
capacity is the key. People have a visceral sense of what is
right for a place. They can feel it. Also, in a healthy
downtown, you'll see that most successful places have a very
high proportion of people in pairs and threesomes and foursomes.
Maybe 40% are females. They don't want to go to a place if
something is wrong with it."
Many foreign cities retain their street life. Whyte says
that Venice has some of the world's best urban spaces. "Venice
deserves all of the kudos it gets," he contends. "In addition
to the spectacular space of Piazza San Marco, Venice has a host
of smaller campi -- squares -- where so much intimate, friendly
interchange occurs. It's absolutely superb." Whyte also likes
Milan, particularly for its cavernous, glass-covered Galleria
shopping area. While he loves the street life of Tokyo, he
bemoans its near total lack of open spaces.
Whyte scorns many smaller Midwestern and Southwestern
cities in America. "They don't have the urban tradition of the
Northeast," he explains. "I know that sounds snotty, but it's
not just the Northeast. Seattle and Portland are tremendous
cities, partly because they both have urban traditions." Smaller
cities in general, he argues, are more vulnerable than larger
ones to competition from nearby shopping malls. "I heard James
Rouse, the urban developer, lecture in Dallas on this. He said,
`You are copying the physical form of my malls. You shouldn't
be doing that because the malls are not for downtown. What you
should be copying is my centralized management, my tenant
selection, my outreach.'"
Whyte also claims that gentrification, one of the symbols
of renewed urban vitality, is not the social evil for displaced
people it has been made out to be. The real culprit, he
contends, is the government decision not to build more housing.
"People think you have a nice Italian family, and then you have
these peace-eating liberals who push them out. Well, that's not
the way it works," Whyte argues. "By and large, many steps have
been taking place before the so-called gentrifiers move in. They
do not buy from the nice ethnic family and kick them out. So
much housing has been destroyed. Look at the Bronx. There has
been more housing destroyed there than has been built in all of
New York. There is the root of the problem -- lack of housing."
Whyte is noticeably quiet about the crime, dirt, awful
schools and general corrosiveness that drive people out of
cities in the first place. One urban expert says Whyte
romanticizes a city that no longer exists -- "the city E.B.
White wrote about in 1946, where you could leave the Stork Club
at 2 a.m. and take the subway home." Whyte concedes that he has
no plan to solve the litany of urban problems, but he denies he
is a dreamer. "I am an anti-Utopian," he says. "We've got a lot
of problems in New York that are not going to be solved by
having nicer parks. I speak with no sentiment at all. I am very
scared of the city. I've been mugged twice."
Why, then, go on living in Manhattan, as he has done for
decades? "You've got to be crazy to live in Manhattan," Whyte
