In The City

Quite simply, William Whyte's primary point in this chapter is that the more under-designed a street, the better the design. The natural tendency as one is creating a shopping area is to veer towards what would seem to make shopping easy for the consumer, but this attempt is ultimately misguided, shoppers do not want easy, they want interesting.

Whyte's views on street design experience an odd kind of symbiosis with the ideas that Norman expresses in The Design of Everyday Things, particularly 'mapping.' Mapping says that the designer should create structures in such a way that the user need not even think about the use; similarly, Whyte discusses extensively the proper way to design a doorway, and the way that subtle manipulations can change the way that people experience and interact with it. Entranceway design, however, is not the same as door design, doors require mapping, they should coax the user into pushing the correct side, entranceways, however need simply to exist, and if designed correctly, will cause the customer to congregate and eventually, to enter.

The two most fundamental elements of a street's design are breadth, and hight. Sidewalks have an optimal size, somewhere between shadowy alleyway and broad avenue, as the former will scare off the potential customer, and the latter will bore them. Height refers to the fact that stores should not remain constrained to the ground floor of a building, and in their vertical expansion, they should coax the eye upward, appearing to extend infinitely upwards due to perspective. The sidewalk should also be a minefield, difficult to traverse, slow moving, and fraught with distractions. All of this difficulty contributes, essentially to the vibrancy of an area, and because vibrancy breeds vibrancy, the street becomes a miasma of energy and consumers willing to incidentally part with their money.