Street Smarts

By John Skow

CITY: REDISCOVERING THE CENTER

by William H. Whyte

Doubleday; 386 pages; $24.95

Turn futuristic city planning upside down, argues this fascinating account, and very little falls out of its pockets. What can make cities work again, runs the cheerfully contrarian thesis of urban researcher William H. Whyte (the author, three decades ago, of The Organization Man), is not less congestion but more. Not monorails, fortress office towers and sanitized fourth-floor skyways between buildings, but hot-dog carts, jostling sidewalk crowds, street musicians, handbill passers, eccentrics, arm-waving conversationalists, three-card monte scamsters and girl-watching construction workers. Winos snoozing. Bag ladies muttering. Commotion, confusion, old people and young lovers sitting down. Some place, if you please, some ledge or wall or even maybe a few chairs, where they can sit. Perhaps even (though this is wildly idealistic) public rest rooms.

The reader takes in this sedition with a widening grin, as if a doctor were telling him to lay off oat bran, a dangerous spiritual depressant, and start packing in butter-fried eggs and thick steaks. Too much recent city construction -- especially the impressive, uninviting plazas that developers build so that planning commissions will let them exceed height limits -- has the people-free sterility of architects' models. Whyte knows why some public areas work well (midtown Manhattan's tiny Paley Park, Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, St. Francis Square in San Francisco) and why some buildings are hostile horrors without and disorienting within (the splashy Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, virtually windowless for eight stories).

Eighteen years ago, Whyte set up a Street Life Project using grant money to count and film pedestrian traffic. Now he has vigorous, yeasty ideas on how wide sidewalks should be, and why people enter some shop doors and not others. He is sharp, shrewd and funny about rarefied subjects: scenic easements, the use of sunlight bounced off buildings, the body language of men on a street corner trying, without success, to break off a conversation. No one involved in planning should miss Whyte's illuminations. For those who are simply walkers in the city, Whyte has redescribed vanity fair.