Discover the secrets of vibrant urban spaces as we navigate the wisdom of the legendary urbanist William Whyte and his Street Life Project. Our conversation delves into the alchemy of turning concrete plazas into bustling hubs of community life, examining how built-in seating and the right balance of sunlight and shade can lead to success. We also scrutinize the controversial practice of hostile design, which raises ethical questions about who gets to enjoy our public spaces.
Discover the secrets of vibrant urban spaces as we navigate the wisdom of the legendary urbanist William Whyte and his Street Life Project. Our conversation delves into the alchemy of turning concrete plazas into bustling hubs of community life, examining how built-in seating and the right balance of sunlight and shade can lead to success. We also scrutinize the controversial practice of hostile design, which raises ethical questions about who gets to enjoy our public spaces.
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Stephanie:
Welcome back Bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, we're following up our conversation with author Richard Ryan on his book American Urbanist, documenting the life and work of urbanist William White. One of White's most instrumental pieces of work, a 10-year project, was the Street Life Project. What was so fascinating about this project, undertaken in the 1970s, is the sheer amount of time and energy that went into it in order to design better open space codes and resulting public spaces. It seems really unheard of today to spend that much time studying a certain topic.
Jennifer:
I would say we spend maybe six or eight months at most studying any new topic like short-term rentals or parking, before we update our codes today, I had actually forgotten that Street Life Project took 10 years to complete, until we were talking about it in our previous episode after reading the book, and that's just astonishing. This profession always talks about how, because we're planners, we think long-term, but I don't know of anyone today who's either in the academic or practical side of the profession who's actually been working on a 10-year long study. A lot of the projects that I work on in the redevelopment space can take 15 to 20 years, but that's simply because of implementation taking a long time, and then we have monitoring periods to make sure that we're collecting the financing that we need. We're not actively collecting data for a project or improvement or anything like that the entire time.
Stephanie:
Yeah, sadly, I think it comes down to funding, because we even got into this in the episode a little bit about how much money was given to Jane Jacobs just to write her book and how it's an insane amount of money that authors would never get today to spend time writing anything and researching a topic.
Jennifer:
That's a good point. None of us have any Rockefellers lining our pockets these days.
Stephanie:
Sadly, the documentary starts by pointing out all the empty public plazas built in New York City in order to take advantage of the density bonus that's offered in their code. Nearly 50 years later, I saw the same issues in Minneapolis when I was working there, a few public plazas were frequented during the weekday lunch hour, but so many were just very large empty spaces.
Jennifer:
One of the first things that White points out is that no matter how big or small a city is, it should have good public spaces, and that it takes a lot of work to actually design bad public spaces. He makes the quip that it's a wonder that we find so many of them. I haven't worked in a large city like Minneapolis or a city large enough to need to use density bonuses, so I can't speak to that. In the communities that I've worked in, I've seen so many professionally designed public spaces empty of any life or anything because they're so over-programmed. So then city staff is actually trying to activate the space and it really becomes a joke.
Stephanie:
Yeah, sadly, we have personal experience with that. Just a few spots, just a few White talks about the most successful plazas being spaces for people watching, and it only took about six minutes to get to the girl watching comment that we talk about in the interview with Richard Ryan. I couldn't help but think about the people unknowingly starring in this film, and whether the intimate couples or the executives that were practicing their golf swing at the corner ever found out that they were in this film. It feels just so intrusive watching people go about their day.
Jennifer:
Especially because this documentary was actually like the filming began in 1979. I also wondered, like, how people felt being recorded in one of the opening scenes. They're panning along, some of the guys that are sitting on a ridge and one guy kind of like looks over his shoulder. He's just very shocked to see a camera Today. Like you expect to be in the back of someone's TikTok video at least once in your life, but this would have been such a commonplace thing at that time, so hopefully no one was playing hooky from work that day. I always find it interesting that people are willing to engage in intimate behavior in crowds. I know like you're surrounded by people and busiest places or their own form of privacy, but watching some of those couples interact was like oops it's really close.
Stephanie:
Yeah, no, I agree. Even in a crowd I feel like someone might recognize you. So the study tracked the amount of open space, sitable space, elevation, male-female ratio, space use, etc. To try to come up with a reason for a successful plaza. The major finding they came up with was really super simple People sit where there are places to sit. Who would have thought they recommended one linear foot of seating for every 30 square feet of open space? But the seating that's most valuable is built into the plaza, like ledges or steps, areas that weren't designed actually for seating, like the benches. Choice is also important, with wider ledges allowing people to sit back to back, low planners, variety of ledges, etc.
Jennifer:
I remember being surprised that the built-in seating was so often preferred seating option when we watched this way back in college. Another thing the documentary makes sure to point out is that people will sit even if an area is designed to discourage sitting or lingering, also known as hostile design or defensive architecture. It is used to discourage lingering or, unfortunately, as an anti-homeless device, but people will typically prevail over these designs and use space anyway. In the documentary one of the people had put like a cardboard box over some pointed ledge areas and when I was working on a downtown revitalization plan, once we had a stakeholder mention that he would have preferred if the benches that we were placing in front of his business had arms to keep away the homeless in the area. I reminded him that, a being homeless is not a crime and they deserve to have a place to sit just as much as anybody else does, and, b that people were going to use the benches however they chose to use them, regardless of if there were armrests or how we designed them.
Stephanie:
And I gently reminded him also how cruel it would look in front of his new development if someone were having to fit themselves in between armrests just to lie down for a bit it was a little suspicious of a conversation, though Sadly, we have remnants of that kind of design throughout our cities, and I'm sure lots of cities do, but the conversation has finally turned away from doing hostile architecture and being more welcoming in the way we designer spaces.
Jennifer:
Yeah, as it should.
Stephanie:
When the documentary gets into perception versus use, it describes two small plazas in New York City with the highest density that is allowed by objective standards, but its occupants perceive the space to be more comfortable. One reason is that they can move the chairs into the spaces that they find most comfortable and I had to laugh a little bit when they started the banjo music to the musical chair scene showing these men picking up chairs, moving them around, moving from one chair to the next all around the plaza. It's really entertaining.
Jennifer:
I know that it's not, but it really felt like it was staged, like they just barely moved the chair maybe a half a foot and then stood up and walked around, and it was definitely odd behavior when you think about it. Even in your own home, though, you do move, like your dining table chair or your bar stool Little each time you sit in. It just get in that like cozy spot, or I do anyway, and it gives you the perception of having individual choice, and it's interesting that, though, in the end, all of the chairs ended up in roughly the same places that they started.
Stephanie:
One point made is the importances of the space just outside the plaza, the street edge. The activity on the street really interacts in an important way with the plaza, drawing them in or looking into the space as they pass by, and about halfway through the documentary there were examples of various cities like Houston that gave cars the preference for the streetscape, leaving large blank walls and unemitting sidewalk areas, essentially killing this important space that helps breathe life into plazas.
Jennifer:
I was in Detroit for the very first time about five years ago and the first place that I wanted to go was the Renaissance Center, primarily because of this documentary. They actually mentioned the Renaissance Center in it. Originally it was designed to be like this big, amazing tower that kept people kind of safe from Detroit. But then a few years ago General Motors actually invested a lot of money into what's called the GM Promenade when it attempted to revitalize the Renaissance Center and create a more pedestrian, friendly, activated streetscape around the megaplex and it was part of the riverfront revitalization that happened in Detroit.
Jennifer:
But you can tell that they didn't watch White's documentary or take it to heart, because there are some built-in steps in places that you can sit and that's generally where the people gather, as they did in the documentary. But there weren't a lot of people when I was there and it was a nice weekend day in September and I do think they've added more tables and movable chairs, so hopefully that helps the space. And I was also. I guess I was very surprised this whole documentary as I kept thinking of things, but I was surprised to hear the documentary talk about not sinking or elevating a plaza. So here in Lincoln we have our sunken gardens and it's one of our most popular public spaces in town.
Stephanie:
Which I suppose speaks to the fact that there isn't one specific approach that works everywhere, that there are some outliers, like the sunken gardens, which is a beautiful space that's commonly used throughout the summer.
Jennifer:
Yeah, or I was thinking of the Highline, new York City Elevated Garden space. Yep, it's the exception that makes the rule.
Stephanie:
It's really interesting to see the drastic changes in the Bryant Park example in New York City. Once caught off park in New York with high rates of crime and a need for police patrols, today it's a really incredible space and we had Mitchell Silver speak at the Nebraska Planners Conference a few years ago and he talked about all the work being done to bring New York's parks back to life and he said the same thing that White did 50 years ago what's the point of fencing off these spaces? White made the note that fencing hurts the space, giving criminal activity a feeling of safety within the areas, and Silver's joke was actually really quite funny. He made the comment about what we were trying to fence in a bunch of trees and whether those trees were going to run away if we didn't have them fenced.
Jennifer:
Mitchell Silver really was one of the best speakers at the conference that we've had, in my opinion, and it's a good point. White points out that even something that would otherwise be perceived as a benign presence can feel really hostile when you feel like you're trapped off and fenced in space. The documentary also talks about how important it is to have a mayor of an area or eyes on the street who are willing to call out undesirable behavior and observe the actions of everyone on the street. Similar to Jane Jacobs, stoop sitters in the death and life of great American cities.
Stephanie:
This is showing another way that Jane and White interacted over the years and how a lot of their work probably influenced each other Excellent point. I'm not sure if this documentary was an influence or if the trend was already in a way, but they get into the influence of water on a plaza space, talking about the contradiction of adding a water feature, then banning it from people touching the water, and they talk about opening up riverfronts and shorelines, again, san Antonio being the star example given within the documentary, but today you can name nearly every city that has a waterfront and they started work doing the same.
Jennifer:
Nothing is better to me than the sound of running water. I think the Lincoln Foundation Garden is the most relaxing place in our city because of the water feature there. I thought about it when they were talking about Paley Park, because it's just really like small, closed off garden that you wouldn't think would be the most popular place because it's almost always busy in the summer, but everybody goes there. It's got movable chairs and a water feature that you can stick your feet in and all of that. The other feature that places like Paley Park have is sun or, more importantly, light, which is also vital to the success of a plaza or public space. White's first observation was that the sun would play a major part in where people would sit and enjoy a space, but that didn't hold entirely true. Sun was an important factor in chillier weather, but otherwise sometimes the best light actually didn't come from direct sunlight at all, but indirect sunlight bouncing off of the glass walls of taller buildings. I know that I generally prefer filter or indirect light in spaces when I'm outside.
Stephanie:
Yeah, agreed. An important aspect, I think, of the Lincoln Foundation Plaza here in Lincoln that you gave is the food cask that they have there, so there's something to grab a bite to eat and then go hang out in the space. And that was one of the things that stood out in the documentary. As noted as a key for plaza is showing that one small food stand will draw people, which in turn draws more food stands than seating is needed for those getting food and essentially snowballs, into a very active space.
Jennifer:
I'm actually very glad that the attitude towards vendors and outdoor dining has shifted since this documentary was recorded. I work on our outdoor dining scene in Lincoln and I update ordinances and try and activate spaces in that way. And Lincoln's been actively updating and encouraging street vending for food trucks and other vendors. And actually a lot of our restaurants have been asking us to do that because A they want to bring more people into the area too and they can't quite keep up with demand on game days and that kind of stuff. But when I first started working on the project, one of the documents I found was a report from like 1982 talking about why Lincoln should adopt outdoor dining and why outdoor dining is such an important thing Better late than never.
Jennifer:
Well, I mean, this documentary was only in 1980s, so that's true.
Stephanie:
We were catching on to White's advice. It's just taken us a little bit longer to codify it.
Jennifer:
Exactly.
Stephanie:
So White wraps up with the idea of triangulation, the characteristic of a space that brings people together. It can be a physical feature or a happening, like a street performer or a sculpture. The performer provides a connection between people drawing in a crowd to watch their show and comment on it to one another. The sculpture provides something to react to and discuss, sometimes a space to sit on, depending on how it's designed, and I can attest that an interesting sculpture has drawn me to several city parks, either on visits or over lunch. When I was working in Minneapolis, there was this really cool park in downtown that always had this rotating display every year, and they were always somewhat interactive in the artwork that was in the space, and I always noticed that it was pretty active during the lunch rush as a result.
Jennifer:
Scale is also discussed. At the end of the documentary, White makes the point that all of these elements we've previously discussed need to be present to make a good public space. But if you get the scale wrong it still will not work. Community density and location are the most important things to consider for successful public spaces.
Stephanie:
And White ends the documentary by revisiting the street from the beginning of the video, 101st Street in New York, which has all the elements he studied throughout New York and in other city plazas throughout the nation. His parting thought is that street is the river of life of the city. We come to these places not to escape the city but to partake of it. It seems his thought was lost for a time but thanks to COVID we relearned how valuable city streets are as a space for people and not a space just for vehicles.
Jennifer:
We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on what's Up. 1.