William Whyte, the American Urbanist

In this episode we talk with author Richard Rein who illuminates the life and work of the extraordinary William H. Whyte. Rein's revelations, based on his book "American Urbanist: How William Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life," shed light on how Whyte's discerning eye for public spaces revolutionized urban design. Our discussion traverses the path from Whyte's iconic "The Organization Man" to his trailblazing stance on pedestrian-friendly cities.

Show Notes:

• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
• Marine Corps Gazette https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=marinecorpsgazette
• Further Reading: Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray, Paved Paradise by Henry Graber

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Transcript

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Unconventional Wisdom of William White

Stephanie 0:00

This episode is brought to you by JEO Consulting Group . Jeo is a full service firm offering engineering , architecture , surveying and planning to clients throughout the Midwest . Since JEO's beginnings in 1937 , they have grown to more than 12 offices across Nebraska , iowa and Kansas . With over 250 employees , they provide innovative and cost-effective solutions for both public and private sectors . The JEO team of professional engineers , architects , surveyors , planners and financial experts all work in concert with skilled technicians and support professionals to exceed their client's expectations . You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast , a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association . In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing , transportation and everything in between . Join us as we get Booked On Planning . Welcome back , bookworms , to another episode of Booked On Planning . In this episode we talk with author Richard Ryan on his book American Urbanist how William White's unconventional wisdom reshaped public life .

Jennifer 1:17

If you , or anything like me , you covered some of William White's work in urban design class and whenever anyone mentions him , your first thought flashes back to that day in class where you got to watch a short film and now you know why it's important to put movable chairs in your public spaces . I would actually recommend that everybody go back and rewatch the documentary . It was fascinating .

Stephanie 1:38

I agree the time lapse video from Tracing the Sun and that first scene in the documentary is what really stood out in my head when I thought back to the video , and it's just really funny seeing 40 years ago what was kind of ahead of its time for planning for public spaces . And stay tuned later this month for an episode where we dive into this classic documentary . Specific to this episode , though , we get into the lesser known aspects of White's life and career , like his days in the military or his first big project on the organization man .

Jennifer 2:10

Yeah , I was actually surprised to learn that White might have actually coined the term group think for any of you 1984 nerds out there . We also discuss how White was able to make some unlikely connections that helped him launch himself into the place making profession .

Stephanie 2:26

Well , let's get into our conversation with Richard Ryan . Well , rich , thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book American Urbanist how William White's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life . Towards the end of the book , you make the distinction that White was able to see and not just look at things , mainly because he wasn't a trained architect . The blinders of formal education were , in essence , removed . How do you think his journalism experience in lieu of a formal education in the design field impacted his work ?

Richard 2:57

Well , like even journalists today , we can make ourselves experts in a lot of different things , and I use the word expert loosely , unfortunately , many times it's a quasi expert , but at least we try . And the other nice thing about journalism is that you can create your own curriculum , and , for example , I would think that William H White , or Holly White as he was known to friends and family . Holly White created his own curriculum at a couple points , for example , when he first started talking about public placemaking back in the late 1960s , early 1970s I'm not sure there was even a course yet . At most planning schools there might have been , but not too many . Now . There I think every school has some nod to placemaking .

Richard 3:40

Another aspect of the White experience that ought to be kept in mind is that he was a journalist in the golden age of journalism this is the 1950s and if you were writing for Fortune magazine , that was probably the equivalent of 60 minutes . Today . They may have sunk even more resources into a story . It was not unusual for a writer such as White to go off and spend six months on a single story . The organization man , which came out in 1956 , is his huge bestseller landmark book of the mid-20th century was the product of reporting over a couple of different years . At one point he actually was out in Park Forest , illinois , where he was studying a community formed of organization men and their wives and children , and he was out there so much they ended up living with one of the people in town . They took him in , they liked him so much that they said , well , just start living at our place , don't go back to the hotel . So it was an unusual setting and it was a wonderful opportunity that journalists have , and especially for White back in the 1950s .

Jennifer 4:48

And you and White are both Princeton alums . That's a nice connection that you guys have . Out of all the amazing urbanists that you could chronicle , was this the connection that drew you to White .

Richard 4:58

Actually it was not , although the Princeton connections turned out to be even deeper than just the fact that we were both alumni . We also both majored in English , which was surprising , and probably some of the professors I had in the 1960s may have just been coming on the scene as White was leaving . I'm sure there was some overlap . So there's the English connection , english department connection , and then also and this I didn't find out until I began researching the book in my freshman year , first time that we all gathered together in the university chapel to hear from the president , the president quoted William H White , and the quotation was to make sure that we didn't just fall into this organization man mode and that instead we would be aggressively looking for ways to change the status quo . And he took out this wonderful quote that White had created back in the early 1950s and he said the only way to change the status quo is to have that kind of curiosity , skepticism and probing , questioning , that if nothing else , you can blow the lid off everything to get some change .

Richard 6:08

And I can only imagine what the president would have said if any of us had remembered that from freshman week and then reminded him three years later when we were storming the local defense department outpost and locking the doors and storming the palace , so to speak . So I don't think he wanted us to take White's advice literally . But there it was . But oddly enough , none of that was really in my mind . I was turned on to White by the chance reading of the last landscape , a book that he had written in 1968 . And I sort of stumbled onto it in the 1970s , and he made the point that we're all trying to save the wonderful countryside and the way to do that is to , yes , acquire land , get conservation easements if you can , but also is to intensify the development in the cities , and the cities were just filled with unused land . I think it might have been in that book that he said every parking lot is a land bank , go for it , which was terrific advice .

Jennifer 7:08

It still is yeah , I was just going to say really , cities still are full of empty land that we could probably increase and develop , including a lot of parking lots , at least in Lincoln . Surface parking here is ridiculous .

Richard 7:22

And in Princeton , New Jersey , where I am .

Jennifer 7:24

That's too very far apart on the spectrum communities , so clearly it's a problem everywhere .

Richard 7:31

Yes .

Jennifer 7:32

I was only familiar with White's Street Life Project . We watched the social life of urban , a small urban spaces documentary , and we were tasked with reading , rediscovering the center , which , I will admit as a student , I only got about halfway through . So I was surprised to learn that he wasn't always an urbanist . We talked about it . He started as a journalist and he first turned his attention , as you've mentioned , to the corporate culture , coining , the term group think , which is . I don't think of William White when I think of group think and writing the organization man . Do you think it was the deep sociological interest that moved him out of the corporate world and into the physical world ?

Richard 8:12

I think what it was was his sense of inquiry and the way he went about identifying a problem and trying to find a solution to it . I think he had a knack for seeing things that everybody else saw right in front of him and re-examining them in a different light and seeing opportunities for change . And it was true of the organization man . Ira had that first side of the white coin that you referred to , jennifer . The organization man and group thing . Ira was one in which everybody thought big organizations were great and the way to have the most successful and productive workspaces were to also have the most harmonious workspaces . Group think was not only practical , it was also right . It was just the way to go is the right thing to do . And so white would look at something like that and say , is that really true ? And that's where he felt a lot of times these subjects were influenced by what he called scientism Essentially he meant pseudo science and not by real empirical evidence . So he would go in and start looking at things and come to a different conclusion

William H. White

Richard 9:15

.

Richard 9:15

And when he came to public spaces and sort of stumbled onto that subject because he was assigned to write the New York City master plan in 1969 , everybody had ideas about public spaces and they thought people wanted to be far apart from each other . They wanted to be sort of isolated from the rest of the city . They were looking for an oasis , and white wondered if that was really true , and his goal was to figure out what made some spaces work , what made other spaces not work . The results were surprising . A lot of times the space that was closest to the street was the space that worked best . But similar approach in each case , different subjects .

Stephanie 9:52

So , speaking of all the different subjects that white undertook in his long career , you mentioned early in the book that he really thoroughly researched topic before moving on to the next idea and you can really see that through the progression in your book . As a result , his career was really quite broad , starting in the organizational man preservation of open space , urban design . He was a journalist , researcher , writer and advocate , all at various times throughout his career . In doing all this research , what do you think was his most influential work ?

Richard 10:23

I certainly came to the subject , thinking that it was his influence on public spaces . I had been influenced by that book , the Last Landscape , and the idea that we could look at cities in a different light and look at even small spaces in a different light . It was in my mind frequently . Looking back at my life . I'm amazed how many times I sort of channeled white in some way , maybe not even knowingly , but some little design item would come up around our office . We talked about where some benches could go in a little plaza that we had and I said well , I think the benches want to be , want to have them movable if they could be , and so on . I got overruled , incidentally . They thought people would steal the benches so they bolted them down . Hardly anyone ever sat in them as a result , but white could have told us that . So I was heavily influenced by the public space .

Richard 11:14

The spark that actually set off the biography was me walking by a little space on the main street of Princeton , a couple blocks from where I am right now , and there was an alleyway that was about 10 feet wide by 80 feet long and there was a guy working in putting in some sort of a canopy over the top of the alleyway and he was trying to create it into a little bit of an exhibit space and performance space . He was still maintaining it as an alley but give it some sort of little use , totally previously unused space . So I walk up to him and I literally say you know , what you're doing is right out of the William H White playbook , harkening back to the last landscape and so on . And this guy just turned to me and said oh , holly White is my hero . First I didn't know who he was talking about because at that time I had no idea that William Hollingsworth White , william H White , was known throughout the community that he worked with as Holly White . So I had no idea at first who he was talking about . But it turned out that this guy was one of just the cadre of White followers , friends , family and fans of White and he immediately recognized my reference . So that triggered my idea about writing a biography .

Richard 12:23

So having said all that , the other side of the White thing that I discovered as I got into it that I also had not known about or just had a vague reference that he'd written a book called the Organization man and I thought how does that relate to anything . I began looking into it and in some ways , for me personally , that side of the White story has had an even greater impact , and I think of it like this the public space side of White is how we as people relate to the physical space around us . The prior iteration of White , the Organization man , was how we relate to the organizations around us . We're part of the public space all the time and we're also even more part of an organization of some sort . You're affiliated with the University of Nebraska .

Stephanie 13:11

City of Lincoln .

Richard 13:12

And the City of Lincoln . Yeah , two important and deep organizations . They've both been around for a long time and I'm sure when you dig into them they are productive and they do a lot of worthwhile things and they may also have a few moments when it pays to stand up and say you know ? I think there might be another point of view here that could be appreciated . And certainly in my career , after a period of being a freelance writer starting a newspaper , community newspaper we had to cover businesses . We were a business ourselves .

Richard 13:41

The lessons of the harmonious workplace resonated over and over again as I was working on this biography . Instead of reading about White's analysis of that and his questioning of whether or not the most harmonious workplace was also the most productive , I thought , hmm , there are times when we value harmony over productivity . Maybe some of those times are good , maybe not , but you ought to be aware of it . At the end of this whole process I walked away with a much greater appreciation for the organizational side of White , and I think it's maybe because it's newer . For me . It's had a more profound impact .

Jennifer 14:19

Since finishing your book , I've gone through and started reading articles about white , and the discourse in the workplace . Situations that you were talking about have been my favorite to kind of read through . I'm actually relatively new to my position . I've only been there about a year Stephanie's new on her end as well , a few years in and I feel like together We've started really questioning like how our departments work together and how we can start creating new projects . And you can tell that it's been uncomfortable for some people and so , as I've been Reading through white's work , like , yep , that's , that's what we're doing . We're the disruptors of our department .

Richard 14:53

Yeah , you know , and I think the beauty of whites approach was that he was Disruptive without being destructive . He had a very generous point of view and was very generous toward people . He was engaged with it and what could have been an adversarial way . One of the people I interviewed for the book I got him Tom Bosley , landscape architect . He's designed a lot of public spaces in New York . Tom recalled going into meetings with white where they were Essentially really holding some big corporate client holding their feet to the fire to get a better public space on the ground and , instead of being Confrontational , white was collegial and he said people walked out at the end of the day all thinking that they had had the idea and , you know , white just kind of put it in front of them and let them , let them take ownership of it .

Richard 15:38

He had a very also a very non-partisan approach , very refreshing . You know need to get into current politics , but you know , working on this book starting in about 2017 was when I got the idea . There was a lot of partisanship going on . Still is . You read this and you saw the Bipartisan way that white worked and the people , like Lawrence Rockefeller , worked with people regardless of political affiliation and so on . It was just very refreshing , invigorating , I might say . It was a nice refuge from reality around me .

Jennifer 16:11

There are three or four times in the margin notes of the book that I have Rockefeller Exclamation point question mark as you highlight . Like stories that where they work together it just seems like such an unlikely pairing .

Richard 16:22

Interestingly , yeah , lawrence Rockefeller was also a Princeton guy , as it turned out , and yet the Rockefellers were another Thread that connects people with William H White . White had an affinity for , an appreciation for what friend of mine has coined the term deep organization , and a deep Organization is one in which they look beyond the current profit and loss line , they look beyond the end of the year numbers and so on and they look at themselves in terms of a longer lasting legacy . Typically they keep archives . Typically they take time to Really dig into a problem that they come up to and say you know , we're not just here to solve the problem for us , but we're really here to solve the problem and put it out in front of the , the greater community . And so the Rockefeller brothers were one of those deep Organizations and they did all those things .

Richard 17:11

The first record that I found of rock of white meeting with the Rockefellers was when he was summoned to the Rockefeller brothers building up the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza , and John D I guess John D the third wanted to talk to him about an article that had just been written in Fortune magazine and in the article white called out the big Foundations for not doing a great job .

Richard 17:36

He thought they failed in identifying Smaller niche areas . They tended to give their money to big recipients , people who were doing big projects . It was sort of an easier way to go if you have to give away , let's say back in those days , let's say 10 million dollars a year . It was easier to give out 10 million dollar grants than to give out a hundred hundred thousand dollar grants . So they would just give the money away to these big operations that needed a lot of money and then their work would be over for the year and white called them out on that . So the Rockefellers took the criticism , I think , to heart and and certainly didn't burn any bridges with white and saw and recognized what he could contribute . An interesting relationship all the way through right up to the very end .

Jennifer 18:19

Yeah , it certainly was , and white lived from 1917 to 1999 , so throughout his life he got to see some of the most rapid changes of urbanization in the country and Experience some of the most tumultuous social changes in the country . How do you think that that impacted whites views ?

Richard 18:38

That is a terrific question , and I'm tempted to just say that maybe it did not change his views . He may have well been a product of his time and a man whose values and sense of inquiry that I mentioned before was set by the time he was a young man . All those changes he was certainly aware of them and all those changes would have changed the subjects that he addressed . I'm not sure they changed the way in which he did address them . On a very trivial note , he had a penchant for referring to women as girls and he referred to Jane Jacobs . Your girl did a great job . Jane was actually a year older than Holly , but that was the parlance in the 1950s and not too many people objected to it .

Richard 19:23

White was still talking about girl watching as one of the things that would happen at a successful public space .

Richard 19:30

If the space was public , there'd be a lot of guys in there who would be girl watching , and he even had that reference in the 1980s when he went to Dallas , texas , to examine one of the plazas there and see how it could be made better .

Richard 19:43

He said boy , dallas ought to be a great town for girl watching , but it's not what's wrong with Dallas , and I can tell you I was there in New York in the 1970s and went to the Time Life Building a lot as a freelance writer and if any of us had referred to the women who worked there , as a girl we might have had our head taken off , at least virtually .

Richard 20:03

We would have gotten some big eye rolls and like what's the matter with this guy ? Kind of thing . I mean , you didn't do that even in the 1970s

William H White

Richard 20:10

. And I did talk to some of his people who worked with him as researchers for his examination of public spaces in the 1970s , who happened to be women , and they said , yeah , we understood . We thought he was just this old , harmless dinosaur and rather than have a fight with him about whether you call us girls or women , we just wanted to find out what intelligent ideas he had going on in his mind , not scold him for what we would now call politically incorrect language . He wasn't a guy who flipped from one point of view to another based on the world changing around him , but he certainly was aware of it .

Stephanie 20:44

Most of what White has published are some of his teachings aged well , but maybe not all of it . Like Jennifer , I was really only familiar with White's Street Life project as well , and so one of the facts that I learned reading your book was that he wasn't just a journalist , but also liked to write fiction stories , and started doing this pretty early on in his life , and he liked to embellish stories , which carried into his nonfiction writing as well . But it's kind of hard to mesh that with his ardent love for data collection . So how do you reconcile White's love for both embellishing a story and his enthusiasm for evidence , which seemed pretty at odds .

Richard 21:21

No one's ever asked me that question before . That is a terrific question , but you're absolutely right .

Richard 21:27

No , and I think you've absolutely called out a great point . Because as an undergraduate at Princeton he was writing plays , very interested in the theater . Even after he got out and when he was first working for Fortune he was trying to moonlight by writing episodes for a radio drama . There were still dramatic productions being done on radio and even on television and White thought he could write some scripts for some of those dramatic presentations . I think I would look at it and say that in a sense he was theatrical in the same way that a good lawyer would be theatrical in front of a jury .

Richard 22:04

White would not run away from the facts and he had the facts .

Richard 22:07

He had the facts more than most people in the room Because he really did go out and dig in deeply in terms of any kind of examination of a public space or an institution Goes back to his Marine Corps experience that we can maybe talk about .

Richard 22:22

But White would dig into it , have the facts , but then was not afraid to embellish , to kind of make the point stronger and to get the attention of the audience . That film , the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces , which I believe you may have seen in your college days or certainly read the book that went with it . That film came about through years of editing and he was just very conscious of how audiences reacted . He originally showed it without any sound and he narrated what later became the narration that's now on the film . He would narrate it extemporaneously and he would react to how people reacted . So he's very aware of the audience in the way that a lawyer might be in making his closing remarks . Now , of course , those embellishments could sometimes get him into trouble and there's one notable instance involving Jane Jacobs as a matter of fact .

Jennifer 23:11

Well , and speaking of Jane Jacobs , you cannot think about White's work currently without his mentorship of Jane Jacobs , and he championed her work during a time when women were not as welcome in the profession , such as the profession existed at the time . So I was surprised to learn that he was somewhat reductionist about her impacts at times , and so can we discuss that push and pull in their friendship .

Richard 23:35

Yeah , I didn't expect to learn so much about Jane Jacobs . Researching the life of William H White the reference that I just made to the embellishment came in the 1980s . White was interviewed by someone , or maybe wrote a preface to a book and referred to Jane . The way a lot of people thought of Jane at the time . He said well , she was a neophyte . She came on board and she wrote a story for Fortune magazine and didn't want to do it . She said all she had ever done was write a few captions for some other magazine . But I insisted and I sort of brought this person up and we found this diamond in the rough and I was one of the people who found it .

Richard 24:14

Now that mythology of Jane Jacobs had gone on for a long time when the death and life of Great American Cities first came out , louis Mumford , the very influential critic for the New Yorker magazine , didn't like the book and his review of the book . He was titled Mother Jane's Home Remedies for the Urban Experiancy just a totally dismissive and argue , sexist headline and tone that Mumford took toward Jane . But the truth is that White in practice judging him by his deeds rather than his later words had really done the right thing by Jane . He recognized Jane back in the 50s and he may have just misremembered this in 30 years later , in the 1980s , but in the 50s he and other people at the Time Life Building recognized Jane's articles that she had written for Architectural Forum and did very good work . She went to a conference in Boston where she really stole the show from a lot of the other presenters and so when White had her write this article in Fortune Magazine that became the seed for death and life of Great American Cities , he was well aware of her talents . Then he helped her get the big grant that she did get to enable her to take time off from her day job and to work full time on death and life of Great American Cities .

Richard 25:28

I didn't make as much of this in the book as I maybe should have because at dawn down the evening later at a certain point she ran out of money . The work took longer and White went back to the Rockefeller Brothers and said you already gave her $10,000 , we know , which was like they're quoting about $80,000 today and no writer today will ever get $80,000 grant to write a book . That won't happen . But it did then and White said she's gonna need another $8,000 or so , wow . And he said I'm convinced that a great and important book is in the works .

Richard 25:59

He really vouched for it Now , at that same time , and this is what I hadn't realized , or I hadn't taken note of it in my mind at the time at that same time in the 1950s , there were all sorts of women researchers the person who was working on the DNA , the people who were working on other discoveries , I think we found out since people at NASA working on the early lunar expeditions and so on , women whose work was kind of pushed to the side by their male colleagues . And I think back today , when Jane needed the extra money , holly went with her editor to the Rockefellers and wouldn't it have been easy for them to say you know , jane's kind of run out of money , she's having a hard time with this book . Holly is the best-selling author . His name is recognized . We saw a million copies of his book , the Organization man .

Richard 26:47

Jane hasn't even sold one book yet . Why don't we make Holly and Jane co-authors of this book , death and Life of Great American Cities ? And then , you know , really it would make sense to put Holly's name first because he's the known name . So I think that easily could have happened , but it didn't . I think that's a testament to White's appreciation for Jacobs and what she could do and for his basically non-sexist approach . He had the right thing in mind for this quote , girl no-transcript .

Stephanie 27:17

So another aspect of William White's life that I was unaware of until reading this book was that he was a military man and had served in the Pacific Rim in 1942 , and that his experience , as you noted in the book , really impacted the rest of his life . What is the most interesting factor story that you uncovered while writing this book ?

Richard 27:37

Well , it was about the military . That was exactly the one that , still , looking back at it , was the one that came in from left field . I never expected it when I first put together the kind of the rough chapter outline that I sent out to try to find somebody who would publish a book on White . Incidentally , the challenge of publishing a biography of White was that he had been dead for 20 years and nobody had ever written a biography of him . As a former and somewhat current editor , the first thing that an editor says is you mean , there's no other biography of White ? Why not ? It must be a bad idea . So in fact he just had been sort of falling between the cracks . But I put together the outline and when I came to the 1940s I thought , gee , what am I gonna say about the 1940s ? He went into the military and you know the story is simple . The young man goes in the military , sees terrible things , horrible things , experiences life and death , and comes out a mature man Boy , becomes a man . Can we stretch that into a chapter ? Well , as it turned out , white did have that experience , but I never envisioned that he would then come back after two years at Guadalcanal and end up writing for the Marine Corps Gazette . I didn't know there was such a publication . I had no idea how seriously the Marines took the art and science of warfare . They were very engaged in that and there was a trove of good material and I mentioned before deep organizations . They kept archives . So even today you can go and see all the White's articles from the Marine Corps Gazette . I was amazed and very pleasantly surprised to find out how much analysis that had gone into the military operation during World War II and how much White was a part of that . And you could see in the Marine Corps Gazette articles that he wrote in the height of the war . You could see the seeds of the organization man he had .

Richard 29:27

One talked about how one of the squad leaders had been a stickler for detail , had not prized harmony , had said we're gonna do it my way or the highway At Guadalcanal . Later , when push came to shove , the guys wanted to go with that guy . We think we'll take that guy who was kind of the stickler for detail . We didn't like him doing basic training . We made fun of him . But now that we're in you know it's life or death . Let's go with that guy . Not the friendliest guy , not the most hard , not the guy who led the harmony parade . He was the stickler , he was the tough guy and they wanted to be on his squad . Very , very interesting thing . So all that came out of the military I never imagined it . I had to change the outline and say , wow , we got to stop and we got to have a whole chapter on the military .

Jennifer 30:16

I think I'd want to be with that guy too , though , if that were the circumstance . I found myself in . White has a lot of work and a lot of perspective that you can delve into , but what's the one insight from White's life that you would recommend all planners take to heart and try incorporating into their own work ?

Richard 30:36

I think , keep in mind the street , keep in mind the edges of the space that you deal with and then work from there . Interestingly , even in his approach to open space , way before he started thinking about the dynamics of how urban space work , he looked at open spaces and he made an interesting observation . Again , this is in the book the Last Landscape , 1968 . He said that as you're trying to preserve space , think about the part that people see first , because it's that space at the edge that gives people the sense of comfort that they're looking for when they go out into the country . So if you've got 100 acres of a junkyard , start out by covering the part that faces the street and then work your way back in . And I thought that was a terrific approach and , in a sense , that that has applied to urban planning

The Impact of William White's Ideas

Richard 31:27

as well . And of course , it's not just the street from curb to curb , it's the street from storefront to storefront . And make sure to think about the sidewalks . And make sure to think about what faces those sidewalks from the developed side , on either side of the street corridor . And for heaven's sake , remember that cars are not king . I've actually come to the point now where I'm writing about cars . I spell it cars with a K and I say cars are not king and we sometimes we do live in car culture . Capital K , capital K . It's dismaying , even today , to see how much deference is given to cars . Here in my very eminent , very walkable downtown , people are always worried first about what's it going to do to traffic and white would say , what's it going to do to the street experience . Cars are part of it , but so are pedestrians .

Richard 32:14

In that movie , the social life of smaller spaces , as you may recall , he takes as an example a street in East Harlem , as one that had all the functionality of a terrific public space and was all spontaneous , was all done by the homeowners and the tenants who were in the buildings . They really made it happen . And then he ended the movie at Seagram's Plaza , one of the most expensive and high priced public spaces you could find in New York , the exact opposite of the wealth spectrum . And yet he said here we are at Seagram's Plaza , but where are we ? We're out on the street . And it's so appropriate to end our discussion about public spaces on the street , because the street is the river of life . The street is bringing the people by , one of the elements of important public space , of successful public space , would be the street . That was one of the four or five key elements . I think that is still my takeaway , and I work around town here with some urban planners and we're always going back to the street . What's happening on the street , what's the effect Makes sense .

Stephanie 33:16

So our Stephanie and I , every dang day , we're attempting to fight the car culture here . Channel some of the William White wisdom . In fact , I think I might like update our redevelopment plans to say , car with a K . So a lot of time has passed since white was working to reshape cities , but not that much has really changed in the field . There , however , have been some significant changes or events that have taken place since white has passed away . Namely , covid had a massive impact on public space . What do you think he would have said about if you had been around in 2020 , with cities moving so rapidly , to try and use the public space for more than just cars and provide space for pedestrians and people to get out and interact , things that he'd been advocating for so long ?

Richard 34:04

Well , holly White was never an I told you so guy . I don't think I can recall him pulling the I told you so card during his lifetime . However , if he showed up in 2020 , I think he would have been justified in saying I told you so , and certainly I was telling everybody . As the COVID thing was unfolding and as we were beginning to recognize the value of our public classes here in town , we were beginning to realize the sidewalks were really not very wide and when people actually started to get out and walk on the sidewalks , they weren't wide enough . We re-engineered one of the main streets in town that have half as much space for cars and twice as much space for pedestrians and , of course , people said oh my gosh , it's going to ruin the businesses on the street because the cars won't be able to be right there the way they were . The merchants were convinced this is one of the porcelain of the urban apocalypse . Oh my gosh , what's happening to the parking in front of our store ? We did it and now a few of us are saying I told you so . We told you so because it followed the White Playbook and it's been hugely successful .

Richard 35:10

I had one interesting benefit from the COVID thing . All sorts of libraries and research organizations were shut down and I couldn't get into the Princeton University Library because of COVID . I had had a community access card before but suddenly could not . But students could and a friend of mine who knew I was working on the William H White Book would hang out at the local public plaza during COVID just to get fresh air and interact with people a little bit , even at a distance , and he'd noticed students also would hang out there , students from the university . They were going stir crazy in the little places where they were hanging out and you saw some woman there working on maybe she had a book that caught his eye .

Richard 35:52

And basically this is the form of triangulation that White Rock writes about . You know , at a good public space , two people total strangers will observe a third thing and begin talking about it as if they'd been lifelong friends . And so this friend of mine starts talking with the Princeton undergraduate and she mentions that she's doing her senior thesis on women who as they were portrayed in Fortune magazine in the 1950s . And my friend said oh , I've got a buddy working on a book about a writer at Fortune magazine . He might have something in common . Well , I didn't have much that could help her with her thesis , as it turned out , and she and I started communicating by email . I never did meet her in person , but we communicated by email and it turned out she had access to the library and when I needed to get Fortune magazine articles which are not digitized and accessible online , she got them for me . There was a COVID moment and all because , you know , we got out of our physical shelves and homes and so on and utilized public space .

Jennifer 36:54

Put an apropos story to end a conversation on William White and his impact . That's amazing . So always our final question is it's booked on planning , so we are really interested in reading around here . Besides a copy of your book , which we will , of course , absolutely recommend to every one of our listeners , they should go pick up what is one other book that you would recommend to our readers ?

Richard 37:19

One or more .

Jennifer 37:20

Or more , it can be five . We're fine with that .

Richard 37:24

I have one in mind , but let me share my shortlist because , first of all , how many times today , back in 1980 , back in the 1950s , when White first started writing about this , how many times and it's already come up in this conversation cars and parking and also zoning . So for zoning , we have the terrific book Arbitrary Lines by M Nolan Gray . I read it all the way through . It turned out to be a page turner , because you wondered how could they sell the idea of no zoning . As you get into it , he showed you a strategy for making that argument . The other thing that we're all thinking about is parking , and there's the book Paved Paradise by Henry Graber . Parking keeps coming up . So we got parking and zoning . So I wouldn't want to forget them .

Richard 38:07

But the book that I would throw at you now is Suburban Nation , and that is by two of the founders of the New Urbanism , andres Duane and Elizabeth Pleiter-Zeiberg . And also the third author on that book written in about the year 2000 , was Jeff Speck . And Jeff Speck , since his going on to have a huge career in terms of walkable cities and so on , has just launched a new twist of his business in recent days , and Jeff's writing is really stellar and it comes through in that book . And also the book shows how urban design principles can really work in a suburban setting and I see over and over again I see the need for that .

Richard 38:47

The nice thing about working in a city most cities recognize that they have problems . They need work to address those problems In the suburban setting . A lot of times people don't think they have a problem , they have no clue and they really do have the problem . They have the problem of suburban sprawl and all that goes with it and Suburban Nation . Really , in a sense it takes Hollywood's city , rediscovering the center , and it sort of recasts it for the suburban environment and does a very good job . A lot of lessons for our suburban readers and viewers who may think that they have very little connection to all that we've been talking about , but in fact there's a lot going on that would apply to them as well .

Stephanie 39:31

All great recommendations and we had Nolan on early last year . It's been almost a year now since we talked to him about arbitrary lines , which is a really great book , but I want to thank you so much for joining us today . It was a really great conversation , yeah it was terrific .

Richard 39:46

I really appreciate your questions and the thought that you gave it , and good luck in Lincoln with your institutions and I'm sure you will bring a good , healthy and constructive point of view to all the challenges you face there .

Jennifer 40:01

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Richard Ryan on his book American Urbanist how William White's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life . You can get your own copy through the publisher at islandpressorg and check out other great titles we've covered . While you're there , remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate , review and share the show . Stay up to date on episode releases and other related topics by following us on social media Just search Booked on Planning . Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning .