City: Rediscovering the Center (Paperback)

~ William H. Whyte (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Informal, spontaneous interactions give the modern city its vitality, so Whyte's ( The Organization Man ) enemies are urban planners who evince disregard and even contempt for street life. Part meditation, part design manual, this marvelously observant tour of cities will please anyone who cares about urban livability," lauded PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Whyte's Street Life Project studied the use of urban spaces for 16 years. This follow-up to The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces ( LJ 4/15/80) is an engaging look at the variety of human interactions which make "downtown" vibrant. Whyte looks at such diverse topics as pedestrian movement, concourses and skyways, sunlight and its effects--all from the perspective of a confirmed city-lover. His observations and recommendations can be read with profit and pleasure by professional planners and readers interested in what makes a city tick.
- Diane K. Harvey, SAIS-Johns Hopkins Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 386 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books Ed edition (January 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385262094
• ISBN-13: 978-0385262095
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #742,211 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for any urban planner., June 30, 1999

By	Randall Reade (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is terrific because William Whyte doesn't relie on any theory. Instead, he logged countless hours watching street corners, public parks and plazas to see how people actually use them, and draws conclusions on how to make them better, safer, and useable. His ideas of planning public areas were first used to a great extent in redeveloping Bryant Park in NYC. Formally a haven for drug users, the city used his findings from this book and turned it into one of the city's most livable and exciting public areas. If only we could design all our streets and plazas with such good common sense!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Skimworthy., January 4, 2009

By	Jason Stokes (St. Louis) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this with high expectations, after reading his other books way back in graduate school, and enjoying them along with their concepts. The problem with City isn't that it's devoid of content, or great ideas, but that it has absolutely no sense of narrative or focus throughout the book.

Whyte jumps from topic to topic, all of which make sense in the broader concept, but it's almost like each of the sections could be taken as its own magazine article, or Wikipedia stub for that entry. He did some amazing work cataloging how people actually use cities, what they do, and some of the most common pitfalls. This book should be converted into an easy to skim website, then it'd be six stars. As a book, however, I browsed it, got some good ideas, probably missed some others, but never could get into it.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: City: Rediscovering the Center (Hardcover)

I'd give it five stars as an urban planning book, but only four stars in comparison to Whyte's landmark The Organization Man, a truly great, but nearly forgotten book of the fifties.

The analysis of corporations moving from Manhattan to the suburbs, wherein Whyte plots distance from the CEOs home to the new headquarters is priceless.