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
