City - Chapter 6

1. The main points of this article were for the author to express what he feels makes a successful design of an urban street - including traffic flow and selling products to passers by. Using example from New York City and Tokyo, he describes a variety of types of streets, architecture, and advertising techniques to manipulate crowds into moving and acting a certain way in a city, including buying and traveling to places.

2. Whyte and Norman have very similar ideas to the approaches of design: They study trends in design, explaining why things are the way they are, out of both functionality and visual appeal. Norman discusses stores and products exclusively in the readings we have discussed so far; Whyte addresses the functionality of a city as a whole as well as the construction of cities to serve certain purposes, especially here drawing customers to businesses. Norman separates design in to three categories: visceral (sensual), behavioral (functional), and reflective (emotional/mental). Whyte, on the other hand, addresses what makes a place memorable and worthwhile to be in: Sensual elements included in the presentation of city streets and the businesses that line them, such as smell, sounds, lights and signs, and so on, manipulate the memories of the customers as they navigate the streets. People can be affected to buy, enter certain stores, move in a certain way, and have certain experiences based upon their surroundings in a city or a store. Whyte also evaluates trends in cities, and how cities have developed over time (such as the success of second-stories and brownstones, or the fading usefulness of windows and doors in drawing a crowd into a store).  Both address how culture affects the design of their respective subjects of study - Norman, stores, and Whyte, cities. By comparing and contrasting New York with Tokyo, Whyte addresses what is successful in a city and what is not - creating a synthesis through studies of both cities.

3. An urban area, according to Whyte, must have very powerful sensory cues in order to function properly and be recognizable as a successful design. The senses must be ignited by this place, making it attractive or at the very least memorable. Thus, the smells, sounds, visuals, and sometimes even touch (like, for example, the blind man) can all trigger something in the frequenters of the street that make it a successful urban design (similar to reflective design in Norman's theories). Whyte also carefully details the importance of space and spatial setups in urban design. The size of a storefront, corridor, sidewalk, etc can all affect the way people react to it. In the narrative about the shop owner who constantly moves a sign to catch people's attention, Whyte proves that space and size cause people to react differently to their surroundings; and thus, spatial relations become an important factor in cities, especially crowded ones where small sidewalks must be shared by a large number of people. The appearance as well as the physical presence of people in a city must come together in order to make a successful design, something especially important in a large city that must both flourish for its own means and also support lives and careers.