January 7th, 2012
Russ Makhauri

This has got to be one of the best videos I have ever watched. This man is insightful, clever and funny. It makes you think about many things that you would normally take for granted in cities. I wish I could have met this man, I’m sure I could have learnt a great deal from him.

co-labdesign:

The Social Life of Small Urban 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)

Reblogged from what is co-lab /
  1. bldgblks reblogged this from co-labdesign and added:
    best videos I have ever watched....insightful, clever and funny. It makes you think about...
  2. wheatprawns reblogged this from kristinesamson and added:
    tumblr, so that i will watch this when i don’t feel guilty abandoning work.
  3. kristinesamson reblogged this from co-labdesign
  4. californiachillwave reblogged this from co-labdesign and added:
    Planning 110: Revisited.
  5. co-labdesign posted this
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