| William H. Whyte |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM H. WHYTE | |
| american sociologists | |
| whyte, william hollingsworth | |
| american non-fiction writers | |
| american architecture writers | |
| urban theorists | |
| 1917 births | |
| 1999 deaths | |
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Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917 and died in New York City in 1999. He graduated from Princeton University and then served in Marine Corps . In 1946 he joined Fortune Magazine . Whyte wrote a 1956 Bestseller titled ''The Organization Man'' after Fortune Magazine sponsored him to do extensive interviews on the CEO s 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 . Other books include: "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" and "City: Rediscovering the Center" SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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