The Social Life of Small Urdan Spaces

In the late 1970s, William H. Whyte (author of The Organization Man) took a leave of absence from his job at Fortune to study one of the issues he’d always cared most passionately about: cities. (While at Fortune he was the first to publish Jane Jacobs on the subject.) He started with a simple topic: public plazas. His hometown of New York City had recently begun giving developers incentives to build public plazas to give people some breathing room in the crowded city and he decided to investigate which plazas worked. He took to the task like a scientist, setting up time-lapse cameras with digital clocks and making charts and graphs and notes. And the conclusions he came to surprised everyone. The result was The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which is one of my favorite books. This is the movie version.

Source: youtube.com