William H. Whyte

William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (1917 West Chester, Pennsylvania - January 12 1999 New York City) was an American sociologist, journalist, and peoplewatcher.

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.

Among Whyte's assistants were Paco Underhill , who has applied this technique to improving retail environments, and Fred Kent , head of the Project for Public Spaces .

Web Resources

• Whyte biography from Project for Public Spaces site
• Extensive biography and interview from 1986
• A link to The organization man

See also

• Jan Gehl