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Bridging Theories, William H. Whyte and the

Sorcery of Cities

Miriam Fitzpatrick

To cite this article: Miriam Fitzpatrick (2016) Bridging Theories, William H. Whyte and the
Sorcery of Cities, Architecture and Culture, 4:3, 381-393, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2016.1251214

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381

ARCHITECTURE
AND CULTURE

Miriam Fitzpatrick
School of Architecture, Bridging Theories, William H. Whyte
Planning and Environmental
Policy, University College
Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
and the Sorcery of Cities
Miriam.Fitzpatrick@ucd.ie

Keywords: W. H. Whyte,
public space, urban theory,
cityness, proximity
Volume 4/Issue 3
November 2016
pp 381–393
DOI: 10.1080/20507828.
2016.1251214
Miriam Fitzpatrick
ABSTRACT William H. Whyte is renowned for his textbook studies of the
choreography of people in public space in the 1970s. From a pro-city
bias, he focused on personal exchanges in the city centre to verify the
benefits of density and intensity. As a public intellectual, he acted
as a bridge to stage a rare fusion of urban theories. Using Whyte as
model for an operative engagement with theory, the narrative pursued
concerns how he zigzagged across intellectual horizons, adopting
theories from adjacent fields, which helped unlock prerequisites for an
atmosphere of “cityness” forged from the inherently wicked problem of
cities; hence sorcery.

No potential conflict of
interest was reported by the
author.
Reprints available directly
from the publishers.
Photocopying permitted
by licence only.
© 2016 Informa UK Limited,
trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Introduction
William H. Whyte is best known for The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,
a textbook study of the choreography of people in public space.1 Set
mainly in 1970s Midtown Manhattan, the book and the associated
documentary by The Street Life Project concentrated on how people
interacted with each other and with the designed environment of
modernist public space. His focus was on “exchange, the most vital
measure of the city’s intensity.”2 Lesser known is Whyte’s commitment
to theoretical framing for understanding this intensity. Whyte’s research
into the behaviour of the everyday users of the city was intended to 382
capture and improve the liveability of the city and debunk negative Bridging Theories, William
associations of density. H. Whyte and the Sorcery
of Cities
Professor of Sociology Nathan Glazer characterized Whyte as Miriam Fitzpatrick
“the man who loved cities ... one of America’s most influential observers
of the city and the space around it.”3 Whyte had an episodic career, but
the focus of this paper is on his empirical research ca. 1969. Since his
Exploding Metropolis series, as editor at Fortune in the late 1950s, Whyte
held that “anti-city” policies were “eviscerating” the city due to a lack
of applied research into their impact on street life.4 Because Whyte’s
previous decade was in open-space research, a new planning tool in the
form of the Incentivised Zoning Code caught his attention.
Since 1961, this code had incentivized setbacks from the street
edge to create plazas. By 1973 developers had received $186 million
in bonuses for an estimated £3.8 million spend, a 48 to 1 ratio without
any evidence of outcomes.5 Whyte questioned if and how their detailed
design benefited the city’s vitality.6 His search was to interpret whether
proximity in cities, specifically spatial relationships in public space,
mattered and why. From the particular, he aspired to reshape the whole.
Mirroring Whyte’s macro-micro method, with a focus on emerging
theories at the time Whyte was practising, this paper alternates between
what anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as “general observations
[and] … specific remarks.”7 This oscillation was Whyte’s leitmotif; he
synchronized a panoptic overview with a synoptic view of life on the
street. How Whyte tapped into the ferment of “an intellectual maelstrom
of the late 1960s” for the benefit of understanding the “sorcery of cities”
is the narrative this essay seeks to advance.8 To appreciate the until-
then-illusive atmosphere of “cityness,” Whyte made public space the
cauldron for his potent fusion of emerging theories. Cityness appears
in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the state or condition of being a
city, urban character or quality.”9 It is used here to describe an alluring
quality of liveability that was at risk of elimination by “anti-city” policies
of dispersal, decongestion and de-urbanization. Cities, through some
mix of enchantment, exert a magnetic attraction. Yet their fascination is
difficult to pin down on any laboratory table, hence “sorcery” in the title
of this essay, which describes how Whyte pinned down a few specifics
for the benefit of urban vitality. Using Whyte as a model, the question
posed is whether, despite the “extraordinary slipperiness of the urban
phenomenon itself,” there might be benefits in clarifying his operative
engagement with theory.10 After a brief outline of divergent theories, this
paper will examine notions of proximity and distance common to both
socio-spatial and theoretical frameworks.

The Intellectual Ferment of 1968–1969

In November 1969, Whyte was ending his sixteen-month secondment to
the New York City Planning Commission where he had helped edit the
titanic comprehensive city plan under its new chair Don Elliott and the
383 reforming mayor John V. Lindsey. “We are not afraid of the bogey of high
density,” Whyte declared his pro-city bias in the plan’s opening pages.
“Concentration is the genius of the City, its reason for being, the source
of its vitality and its excitement…”11 The team’s effort resulted in what
Professor Hilary Ballon described as “one of the most remarkable and
creative chapters in American urbanism.”12
His contemporary, Copenhagen urban designer Jan Gehl,
described the theoretical context of planning in the 1960s as
fragmentary at best, a time when many fixed blindly on quantitative
predictive modelling of congestion to cope with turbulent conditions of
city changes.13 Early to be adapted to computer manipulation, the traffic
department’s goal of an intersection-free city was in the ascendency.
Their “frictionless” model city had a long gestation, propelled into the
public imagination by the popular exhibition Futurama in 1939.14 But for
Whyte to counter the hegemony of anti-congestion models and motives,
he was eager to gather systematic research on how people responded.
Whyte held that “In fighting the image of the city as a destroyer, we are in
danger of destroying not merely the dirt, the noise, and the congestion,
but the dynamic of the city itself.”15
Robin Evans posited that the cumulative effect of frictionless
living in domestic space was “a general lobotomy performed on society
at large, obliterating vast areas of social experience.”16 While it stretches
reality somewhat to magnify observation from the domestic to the scale
of city, the analogy is potent in regards to its deep fascination with
what draws people towards each other and the value of encouraging
encounters rather than isolation. Using theories that supported his
deep fascination with the frisson of social encounters, as he sought
to erect the lineaments of everyday occupation, evidence of behaviour
and preferences became Whyte’s priority. Luckily, his interest found
resonance in other disciplines at a time fertile with theories that shared
a similar starting premise.
Following a tumultuous period of social unrest in New York,
“Earth Day” in spring 1970 galvanized a panoply of public interests
in the environment. It was also a time of disciplinary discontent with
hermetically sealed borders of knowledge; a time of burgeoning
scholarship in environmental and applied behavioural research. This
context captured a rare and timely cauldron in which Whyte brewed his
Street Life Project (1970–75).

Environmental Psychology: Why Proximity Mattered

By 1969, in part driven by the rancour of the anti-city tribe, Whyte’s target
was specifically to counter misconceptions of density.17 He set out to
discount theories of behavioural researchers, in particular those of John
B. Calhoun.18 Calhoun’s study of Population Density and Social Pathology
fused the idea of the crowd with pathology, space with numbers and
proximity with a tinderbox of dissent, which Whyte argued misled the
public’s perception of urban density.19 Calhoun’s proposed pathologies 384
that translated rats’ behaviour directly into that of urban-dwellers were Bridging Theories, William
unproven,20 yet his popularity generally fed into the broader vilifaction of H. Whyte and the Sorcery
of Cities
density for societal challenges of overstimulation and anomie. Miriam Fitzpatrick
Whyte especially mentioned his indebtedness to Edward T. Hall’s
The Hidden Dimension and Robert Sommer’s study Personal Space: The
Behavioral Basis of Design for grounding his empirical studies.21 Their
simultaneous development of Proxemics guided Whyte’s interest into
the effect of density on spatial relationships in public space.22 While
environmental psychologist Sommer defined dimensional distancing,
cultural anthropologist Hall advanced three spatial types: fixed feature,
semi-fixed and informal. Whyte’s varifocal lens traversed these intimacy
gradients to examine how people positioned themselves relative to each
other in public space and in turn to measure their response to designed
elements for standing, sitting or socializing.
Whyte’s humour danced elegantly with theory in expounding
specifics: “two backsides deep” plus some space between was how

Figure 1
The 100% Conversation; Analysis of Social Clustering by “The Street Life Project,” Project for Public Spaces, New York (www.pps.org).
385 Whyte described the ideal dimension for a bench.23 Figure 1 recorded
the intricate seating configurations of eight benches from Whyte’s Street
Life Project during July to August 1973. By encircling social clustering,
Whyte’s team tabulated how people when alone or in groups gravitated
towards each other. A pattern emerged that proximity in space mattered
and that people are instinctively centripetal. By capturing what people
did at a micro-level as opposed to what they said they did, their patterns
accumulated to verify how they were attracted to the 100 per cent
location. Far from “avoiding crowding,” eschewing other people or the
city, Whyte’s project demonstrated the overall number and pattern of
crowding increased year on year, disproving Calhoun and planners’
association of density with discomfort, proximity with anomie.24
Whyte’s dynamic fusion of theories was driven by an urgency
to change policy. The Planning Commission had offered to change the
zoning ordinance if he could produce verifiable evidence for making
particular improvements, which he delivered in 1975. His demonstration
of the falsity of Calhoun’s theory sparked a deeper fascination with
cityness, which continued well after he had improved over three hundred
spaces affected by the 1961 code.
Just as some settings were more conducive than others to
accidental encounters because of their physical design, so too certain
minds were more likely to make sense of serendipitous discoveries
because they were predisposed to make connections and better placed
to communicate. These lynchpins played a well-documented role in
Whyte’s work on social life, but they had an equally operative role in
bridging theories.25 With the skill of a sorcerer, Whyte reconfigured urban
studies more broadly. His act of “rubbing elbows” at the intersection of
theories advanced the social life of theory itself.26
But if proximity described intersections with adjacent people
or theories, ultimately Whyte did not reach his insightful conclusions
without some distancing. To the mix of behavioural scientists, Sommer
and Hall, we need to add next the congruent theories of two significant
social thinkers, first the intellectually curious Clifford Geertz and second
the systematically intelligent Robert K. Merton.27 Both students of the
grand-theorist Talcott Parsons during the 1950s, Geertz delved further
within theory while Merton connected between theories. Each described
an operative intellectual distancing relevant to Whyte.

Social Science and Anthropology: Why Distancing Mattered

By placing human behaviour in wider and deeper contexts,
anthropologist Geertz developed the well-known practice of Thick
Description to extract large conclusions from small but densely
textured facts.28 Much of Whyte’s empirical work is of this order. In his
research proposal to the National Geographic for his Street Life Project,
Whyte explicitly stated that he wished to borrow techniques used by
anthropologists and apply them to the study of natives of cities such as
New York. Geertz continually returned to the field to deepen the question 386
he would ask of his cultural interpretation. With a socio-anthropological Bridging Theories, William
focus, he attempted to untangle meaning from a Weberian web of human H. Whyte and the Sorcery
of Cities
interactions. Geertz described the need for the researcher to shift Miriam Fitzpatrick
vantage point from the “experience near” to the “experience distant.”29 In
summarizing an intellectual dexterity in 1974, he justified hermeneutic
oscillations as a “continuous dialectical tacking between the most local
of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to
bring them into simultaneous view.”30
This reframing or dolly zoom between intimate and universal
experience held particular resonance for Whyte. It was also the exacting
focus of Robert K. Merton’s proposal of Middle Range Theories. This was
a concept advanced by Merton in his 1949 classic text Social Theory and
Social Structure, which linked universal explanations or grand theories
to context-rich empirical measures, and vice versa, into a relationship
or stratification (see Figure 2).31 By 1970, when Whyte was appointed
distinguished Professor of Sociology at City University New York
(CUNY) Hunter College and began his innovative fieldwork in Midtown
Manhattan, Merton was well established in advancing the theoretical
rigour of qualitative analysis, across Central Park at Columbia University.
Merton’s rejection of the abstract theorizing of his tutor Parsons
had prompted his challenge to the systematics of social theory. He
suggested that empirical research went well beyond a passive role of
verifying theory, that it enriched and fructified theory. He was driven to
link unitary theory with rich verifiable empirical data via his innovative
concept of Middle Range Theories. Its associations with a middle ground
was timely as it paralleled a levelling of power that was central to urban,
racial and indeed academic struggles in the tumultuous late 1960s.
Just as the street-corner acted as a magnet for meaningful encounters
in public space, the crossroads of Middle Range Theories acted as a
filter between a rich array of near specifics and distant universals,
which ultimately led to a special fusion of theories in the appreciation
of cityness. This brings us closer to Whyte’s synthesizing role at a
serendipitous crossroads between theories.
Both Geertz and Merton described a path towards synthesis as a
vertical distancing, a metaphorical sweep upward to consider the bigger
picture. Anthropologist Roy Ellen summarized their epistemological
strategy as a pyramid. Figure 2 illustrates his stratification where
context-rich empirical data formed the base of the pyramid, and
universal explanations the peak. But by cutting a section through the
middle – as Figure 3’s plan view illustrates – more weight is given in
the ascent to grand theories through the staging post of Middle Range
Theories. The flattened hierarchy represented by Figure 3’s porosity
between adjacent theories in the middle (shown as a grey area) captures
a fluidity and reciprocity between each that is potentially more dynamic
than any direct assent towards a synthesis.32 Rather than a tiered
387 Roy Ellen’s Nested Properties Of
Anthropological Theory

Universal
Explanations Grand

Increasing Simplicity Of
Unified
Theory
Explaining Increasing Universal
Co-variation
In the
Explanations
Properties Interpretative Lens of
Of Different Culture & Discipline
Social

Data
Systems

Interpretation
Empirical Measures/ Thick
of Particular
Description/Context Rich
Contexts

Figure 2
A Pyramid of Theory, based on a diagram by Roy Ellen, “The Nested Properties of Anthropological Theory” in “Theories of
Anthropology and ‘Anthropological Theory’,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (June 2010): 398.

Clifford Geertz Bridging Theories

Edward T. Hall

Cultural Meaning
Centro-centralism & Decentralization

Anthropology
Hartland Bartholomew

Social Groupings

Robert K. Merton

Erving Goffman
W Foote Whyte
Edwin Gutkind

W.H. Whyte
Charles Colby

Sociology
Geography

Architecture
Public Space &
the City

Psychology

Proximity &
Propinquity

Robert Sommer
John B. Calhoun

Figure 3
A Flattened Fluidity of Adjacent Theories, Whyte’s operative engagement with Middle Range theories (the darkened zone). Drawn
by the author.
 388

Bridging Theories, William

H. Whyte and the Sorcery
of Cities
Miriam Fitzpatrick

Figure 4
Paul Klee, “Pagodas on
the Water,” 1927. Copyright
estate of Karl Nierendorf,
from the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New
York.

stratification of importance, theories are flattened; “rubbing elbows” they

nudge each other towards new insights.33
Nesting theories, rather than the hierarchy suggested by a
pyramid, comes closer to what Whyte described as alternating “looseness”
and “tightening-up” in his operative engagement with theory. Drawing a
parallel with journalism, he characterized looseness as dynamic and in
the interest of generating “relevancies.” By contrast, “tightening-up” was
when “you see connections.”34 A fusion is forged which we might surmise
as the great alchemy of cities and of urban theory.

Analytic Borderlands and Whyte’s Legacy

Whyte cut across separate urban silos to explain, if not a city’s sorcery,
at least the alchemy of its wicked problem that Rittel and Webber
described in 1973 as “a problem that cannot be defined until the solution
has been found.”35 To make his claims, Whyte avoided any omniscient
positions, but rather adopted the role of a seminal Middle-Range
theorist, an alchemist himself in the fusion of theories. So enmeshed
was he in “the typically untidy, opportunistic adaptations that scientists
make in the course of their enquiries,” he rarely cited theory.36 Yet,
by testing multiple hypotheses, constantly changing his horizon, he
got closer than most to explaining the unforeseen consequence of
decongestion on the ephemeral qualities of cityness.
Whyte, by his intellectually fecund notion that ideas are social,
got us closer to a theoretical context where theories could intersect and
cross over.37 His work filled a dialectical cleavage between higher and
lower order theories; equally it filled a gap between the panoptic view of
planners and the socially savvy view of street life, between top-down and
bottom-up planning. He was shaped by his time and in turn he helped to
reshape it through his tenacious empirical findings.
389 He knew “the importance of people and their stories, to cut
across disciplines and get ideas across.”38 His method exposed the
particular conundrum of vantage point that academics faced daily: how
to be in the thick of things yet remain distant enough to abstract and
synthesize relevancy for other applications. The thickenings of views
that Whyte practised also shaped the iconoclastic and socially relevant
study of the everyday by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen
Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas.39 This was a book that taught
generations of students to look with a new perspective at the everyday
landscape: the ugly, the ordinary and more so the popular. Stylistic
preferences notwithstanding, their collective synthesis was at the
forefront of an emerging interest in place making and public life studies.
The jointed pyramids of Paul Klee’s Pagodas by the Water (Figure
4) illustrate one final aspect of Whyte’s operative engagement with
theory, namely the dynamics of reciprocity and reflection in a web of
reading cultural meaning. We evaluate ourselves by studying others; in a
hermeneutic cycle, we test our theoretical frames against others. Klee’s
depiction of the delicacy of each pagoda and its potential to destabilize
captures separate theoretical systems (planning, sociology, design,
anthropology, architecture, etc.). The fact that the pagodas alternate yet are
contiguous, connected by an Ariadne’s thread, not only suggests an odyssey
of discovery that enriches theoretical enquiry, but also illuminates the fine
line all researchers tread between theories and our reflection, between
empirical facts and theoretic flows, between messy data and clear
universal explanations, and between our vantage point and the horizons
of others in reaching conclusions. In a contingent search for solutions, like
Araidne's thread from the labyrinth, creativity offers an escape route. The
wizardry is how creative minds regularly tread this fine line successfully.
In his role as a public intellectual, Whyte liked to “dance
with data, enjoying recursive reflexivity, strange loops, and nonlinear
inconclusive structures,” which Christine M. Boyer characterizes as
“associative thinking,” or which Clifford Geertz describes as “blurred
genres.”40 Each concept describes the dynamics between systems
whereby “discontinuities are given a terrain rather than reduced to
a dividing line.”41 This wider, looser field fits Whyte’s outlook whose
“opportunistic adaptations of hypotheses” drew dynamically on theories
from adjacent disciplines directed towards a public purpose and towards
action.42 A man who liked to ballroom dance in his spare time, Whyte’s
appreciation of choreography may have led to his embrace of “thinking
as bringing ideas together, flirting with each other, learning to dance and
embrace.”43 His focus on disseminating ideas as an urban intellectual,
rather than as an academic, may explain why his insights have an
enduring revelatory power for urbanists.

Conclusion
Whyte’s odyssey was contextualized as he made all theories a common
cause for “cityness.” He linked quantitative data at one scale to a
qualitative assessment of another; this was key to his rare insights, 390
which unfolded from the physical to broader implications of social Bridging Theories, William
habits. Just as the measure of cityness at one scale should be assessed H. Whyte and the Sorcery
of Cities
by its impact on multiple other scales, so too the measure of urban Miriam Fitzpatrick
theory at one level should be reassessed by its reciprocity at many other
levels and with adjacent fields.
Whyte’s advocacy of intensity worked for the city. His legacy is
still felt in New York City today, which, after Whyte, reshaped itself by
the policies of compaction rather than dispersal. A focus on Whyte’s
“terpsichore” on the city’s steps, stoops and seats might not only remind
us of how theory can be used to derive multiple micro-hypotheses,
but also to record why the “sorcery of cities” still exerts its magnetic
attraction.44 If cities need sorcerers, theories are their alchemy.

Miriam Fitzpatrick graduated in Architecture from University College

Dublin, holds a Masters from the London School of Economics’ Cities
Programme and is now a full-time academic in Ireland, lecturing in
Architecture at Waterford Institute of Technology and Urban Design at
UCD. She previously worked for international design firms, including
Grimshaws in London, Diamond Schmitt Architect in Toronto and
Sasaki Associates in Boston. She is a member of the Board of the
Heritage Council of Ireland and Committee member of AIARG (All Ireland
Architecture Research Group).

Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the ongoing generosity of many of Whyte's
acquaintances in my research quest and Professor Hugh Campbell for
his judicious Ph.D. supervision.

ORCID
Miriam Fitzpatrick http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2678-8575

Notes
1 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small
Urban Spaces (Washington, DC: The
Conservation Foundation, 1980), and a
film by the same name by the Municipal
Art Society of New York (Santa Monica,
CA: Direct Cinema Ltd, 1980).
2 Joan Copjec, and Michael Sorkin, Giving
Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (New
York: Verso, 1999), 4.
3 Nathan Glazer, “The Man Who Loved
Cities,” Wilson Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999):
27.
4 William Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958);
William Whyte, “The Anti-City,” in Man
and the Modern City: Ten Essays, edited
by Elizabeth Geen, Jeanne R. Lowe,
and Kenneth Walker (Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1963), 45–58; William Whyte, “The
City Eviscerated,” Encounter XL, no. 4
(October 1958): 28–32.
5 David Dillon, “The Sage of the City,”
Preservation 48, no. 5 (1996): 74.
391 6 From 1961, for every square foot of plaza
set-back provided, developers could
gain 10 square feet of office space above
the zoning allowance. The take-up was
universal, prompting Whyte to query the
logic and the benefits.
7 Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point
of View: On the Nature of Anthropological
Understanding,” Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1
(1974): 44.
8 Irwin Altman and Kathleen Christensen,
Environment and Behaviour Studies:
Emergence of Intellectual Traditions (New
York: Plenum Press, 1990), 1; Jonathan
Glancey, “City: A Guidebook for the Urban
Age,” book review of City, A Guidebook
for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith, in The
Guardian, 8 June 2012.
9 Oxford English Dictionary, accessed
online, 8 August 2016.
10 Neil Brenner, David J. Madden and David
Wachsmuth, “Assemblage Urbanism and
the Challenges Of Critical Urban Theory,”
City 15, no. 2 (2011): 226.
11 The New York City Planning Commission,
Plan for New York City, 6 vols., 1969.
Whyte was copywriter and conceptual
driver of the content and presentation of
vol. 1, Critical Issues.
12 Hilary Ballon, “The Physical City,” in Sam
Roberts, America’s Mayor, John V. Lindsay
and the Reinvention of New York (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 134.
13 Jan Gehl, interview with author, 15 July
2009.
14 Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm:
Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social
Territory (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine De
Gruyter, 1998), 208.
15 Whyte, “The Anti-City,” 45.
16 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and
Passages,” Architectural Design 4 (1978),
267–78.
17 William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering
the Center (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press), 4.
18 John B. Calhoun, “Population Density
and Social Pathology,” Scientific
American 306 (1962): 139–48. Calhoun’s
theories were also criticized by Edward
T. Hall in his The Hidden Dimension:
Man’s Use of Space in Public and Private
(London: Bodley Head, 1969), 24–29.
19 Calhoun, "Population Density and Social
Pathology,” 139–48.
20 To fuel his anti-urban fervour, Calhoun
had even created miniature cities for his
rats to model and mimic the urban world.
Discussed in C. Fisher, M. Baldassare,
and R. Ofshe, “Crowding Studies and
Urban Life: A Critical Review,” Journal
of the American Institute of Planners 41
(1975): 415.
21 Robert Sommer, Personal Space: The
Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Hall, The
Hidden Dimension, op.cit.
22 Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban
Spaces, 120.
23 Ibid., 31.
24 William H. Whyte, A Comparative Study
of Street Life, Tokyo, Manila, New York
(Tokyo: Research Institute for Oriental
Cultures, Gakushuin University, 1978), 2.
25 In his study of the new town of
Forest Hills for his best-selling The
Organization Man, Whyte examined
how social patterns formed between
neighbours and concluded that
physical proximity was conducive to
“fraternization”: “The location of your
home in relation to others not only
determines your closest friends; it also
determines how popular you will be.
The more central one’s location, the
more social contacts one has.” Whyte
cited similar findings on how physical
design matters to social relations
from research by Leon Feininger on
“Propinquity” from 1950 (Whyte, The
Organization Man (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1956), 346).
26 Quote from keynote address by Whyte to
his school, St Andrew’s Delaware, on the
benefits of close living at this boarding
school.
27 Interestingly in the context of sorcery,
Merton adopted the stage name “Merlin,”
a magician.
28 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description:
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”
in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Geertz credits Gilbert Ryle for coining
the term. Also discussed in John
Rennie Short’s Urban Theory: A Critical
Assessment (London: Macmillan, 2014), 3.
29 Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View,”
26–45.
30 Ibid., 43.
31 Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and
Social Structure (New York: Free Press,
1968), 39. See also Craig Calhoun,
Robert K. Merton, Sociology of Science
 and Sociology as Science (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.
32 Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The
Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of
Philosophical Concepts and Methods
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 49.
33 Archival note delivered by Whyte at
a keynote address to his school, St
Andrew’s Delaware, on the benefits of
close living at this boarding school.
34 William H. Whyte, The Essential William
Whyte, ed. Albert LaFarge (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2000), 118.
35 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber,
“Dilemmas in a General Theory of
Planning,” Policy Science 4 (1973):
155–69.
36 Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure, 4.
37 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club:
A Story of Ideas in America (London:
Harper Collins, 2002), xi.
38 Charles E. Little, “Holly Whyte’s
Journalism of Place,” in The Humane
Metropolis, ed. Platt Rutherford
References
– Altman, Irwin, and Kathleen Christensen.
1990. Environment and Behaviour Studies:
Emergence of Intellectual Traditions. New
York: Plenum Press.
– Baggini, Julian, and Peter S. Fosl. 2010.
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