Whyte, William H.

Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1917, William Hollingsworth Whyte is regarded as one of the 20th century's keenest firsthand observers of American urbanism and the uses of public space in the city. Before his death in 1999, Whyte condensed his ideas on cities and the social organization of American society into a number of important books, including The Organization Man and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

Whyte began his career as an urbanologist after World War II, when he joined the staff of Fortune magazine in 1946. While writing a host of articles on veterans who had returned home from the war, he became intimately interested in the emergence of the nascent culture of the suburban middle class during this period. Out of his intense interest in this social phenomenon came Whyte's seminal work, The Organization Man. Using the suburb of Park Forest, Illinois, as a touchstone for his wide-ranging analyses and commentary, Whyte offered a portrait of the ways in which the changing nature of organizations and those in their employ was significantly affecting middle-class people's lives and the places they inhabited. Published in 1956, the work sold more than 2 million copies and was translated into 12 languages.

After the success of this work, Whyte began to examine the changing character of rural spaces throughout the United States, an effort that culminated in the publication of several pieces that advocated protection of the unique and distinct qualities of these places. Continuing this work through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Whyte also found time to serve on President Lyndon B. Johnson's Task Force on the Preservation of Natural Beauty and also as a trustee of the American Conservation Association.

In the middle of the 1960s, Whyte turned his powers of observation and analysis back to what he often described as his favorite place in the world: New York. Over the years, Whyte had grown increasingly concerned about the ways in which suburban-style developments and physical planning axioms had begun to dominate thoroughly chaotic and seemingly disorganized urban places. Whyte reveled in exactly these types of places and became increasingly dismayed at the ways in which formalized planning schemes seemed to be eroding the dynamism of the city.

Utilizing time-lapse cameras and firsthand observations, Whyte began to document the social life of a variety of urban places, such as plazas, in the hope that his work would begin to influence the design schemes of both private landowners and public planning agencies. Through his work with the Street Life Project, Whyte began to identify the common elements that helped create vibrant and active urban places. Much of this work was documented in his book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which was published in 1980. Whyte's work and legacy continue to resonate through the persistent efforts of various individuals and organizations who examine and study informal urban spaces across the United States.