A Street-Smart Love Song to the American City : CITY : Rediscovering the Center <i> by William H. Whyte (Doubleday: $24.95; 386 pp.) </i>

At first glance, “City” appears to be a study of what makes a big city work. But, for all its scientific integrity and its abundance of data, “City” is not a technical study of urban planning. Rather, it is more nearly a rhapsody--its author, William H. Whyte, is a man in love with the city, especially New York City, and he writes with the passion, the sharp but forgiving eye, and the big heart of a man who is still in love with his wife after a long and sometimes stormy marriage.

More than 30 years ago, Whyte added a phrase to the American language with his best-selling book, “The Organization Man.” More recently, he has been a kind of urban conservationist, documentarian and activist--Whyte authored “The Plan for the City of New York,” produced a book and a documentary film for PBS on “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” and lobbied for urban planning reform and open space codes throughout the United States. Now he sums up his work--and his vision--in a pleasantly chatty but abundantly well-documented study of the American city.

Whyte and his platoons of graduate students have conducted an ongoing surveillance of the streets of New York, using a time-lapse camera and other scientific tools to make careful measurements of the uses of the city street. (Among Whyte’s early sources of support was the National Geographic Society, which gave him the first domestic “expedition grant” in its history; the paper work, Whyte reports, included a

question about inoculation of expedition members against tropical diseases.) The question he sought to answer was simple but profound--what makes a successful city, and what turns a city into a fortress, or a wasteland, or both?

Whyte has a gift for plain speaking, and a compassionate (if often ironic) disposition. “Much has been learned about the factors that make a place work,” he deadpans. “One of our principal findings: People tend to sit most where there are places to sit.” And he has made some rather more surprising discoveries: Small cities are not friendlier than big ones;

“schmoozing” is a vital element of a successful street scene; a crowded street, in most circumstances, is a happier place than a sparsely used one; the “second-storiness” of a streetscape is especially inviting; the design of trash cans is a crucial element of urban planning; hot dog stands, three-card-monte dealers and “bag ladies” make the city a

livelier and more appealing place.

“What attracts people most, in sum, is other people,” Whyte insists. “Many urban spaces are designed as if the opposite were true. . . . Too much empty space and too few people--this finally emerged as the problem of the center in more cities than not.”

“City” is written in clear, straightforward, and vivid prose, so unlike the argot of architects and urban planners that I wanted to give Whyte a big hug. (“City” often had that effect on me--it is, above all, a completely endearing book.) Whyte bubbles over with data, most of which is utterly fascinating, if not completely to the point. He gives us an aside, for instance, on the use of hand gestures in conversation

among Orthodox Jews in the diamond district--and points out that some gestures have remained unchanged since the days of ancient Greece and Rome. He paints vivid portraits of some of his favorite street people in Manhattan: Mr. Magoo, Mr. Paranoid, the Aztec Princess, the Witch. He pauses to describe the look on the face of a pedestrian who happens

across a street performer.

“So often they will smile,” he writes. “A string quartet. Here at Forty-fourth! Their smile is like that of a child.”

The villain of Whyte’s piece, of course, is the tendency of developers, architects, and urban planners to make over the city center to resemble its worst enemy, the suburban shopping mall. He decries the tendency of commercial landlords to remove chairs and benches from plazas and sidewalks--or to plant iron spikes on ledges that make for comfortable seating--in order to discourage the idling pedestrian and to drive away the street people. And he despairs of the new trend toward skyways and subterranean concourses: “The war against the street gains force,” Whyte warns. “They are taking the principal functions of the street and putting them almost anywhere but on street levels.”

Whyte may be bighearted, but he is also savvy and street-smart. “I don’t wish to be a Pollyanna. There are dangerous places in the city, and dangerous times. There are dangerous people. But it is important to differentiate between kinds of people--between the mugger, for instance, and the vendor,” he writes. “It might be in order to come up with a city index of enjoyability--the number of street entertainers, food vendors, people in conversation, the number smiling. A silly index, but there is a simple point to be made. Street people aren’t just a problem; they are the heart of the street life, of the center. Its liveliness is the test of the city itself.”

Whyte has turned his attention to cities throughout the United States and, indeed, around the world--Detroit and Los Angeles, Dallas and Pittsburgh and San Francisco, Milan and Tokyo, London and Rome--but New York is still the principal setting of “City.” Still, Whyte makes no apologies: “I have been scolded about this, the city being deemed too unique, too skewed, too much of a distorting mirror,” he writes. “New York is a place that exaggerates things, no mistake. But it is not necessarily any less informative for that. . . . Our working assumption was that behavior in other cities would be basically the same, and subsequent comparisons have proved our assumption correct.”

A dedicated Angeleno--or even one who is anguished by the quality of urban life in Los Angeles-- may come away from “City” with a faint sense of frustration. Whyte focuses on the urban center as the living heart of the city: He praises the Biltmore Hotel and the Oviatt Building in downtown Los Angeles, for example, and condemns Atlantic-Richfield Plaza and the Bonaventure complex (“an outstanding example of disorientation”). But “City” does not have much to say about the multicentered urban landscape of Southern California. Then, too, Whyte’s vision may be so tightly focused that he misses in Los Angeles precisely what he seeks to praise--”City” bemoans the fortresslike stretches of Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles, but makes no mention of the thriving street life that can be found only blocks away on Broadway, Hill, and 1st streets.

Still, “City” is mostly right-on. Whyte urges us to cherish what is best about the big city, to fight our own suburban fears of eccentricity and chaos, to embrace the city as the fullest expression of humanity living with itself in true intimacy. He is an authentic visionary, and Los Angeles would be a better place if we learned to see the city through his eyes.