[ Music ]

>> This is the plaza of the Seagrem Building in , late morning. With a time-lapse camera we were testing a hypothesis. The sun, we were pretty sure, would be the chief factor in determining where people would sit or not sit. Now, just after 12 they begin to sit right where the sun is. I was enormously pleased. What a perfectly splendid correlation. It was quite misleading as we would see later but it was a very encouraging way to start. We were studying the Seagram's Plaza because it was one of the most popular. Many people didn't think that it would be but it was and we wanted to find out why. Our research group, The Street Life Project, had been observing other kinds of city spaces. One was a block of 101st Street in East Harlem. We didn't know it at the time but almost every factor that later we were to find was important for a city space we could have found out right here. The clues were right under our noses.

[ Children Playing ]

We had studied play areas such as this adventure playground and it was a very good one too, wonderfully messy, lots of dirt and mud and the water that kids love so much. Sometimes it was crowded and this was a problem that we were very interested in because we had started out with great concern over the problem of urban overcrowding but the more we studied this play area and other play areas the more we began to realize that the great problem of these spaces is not overuse but underuse. Even this playground, a very good one, on a day like now which is a beautiful day in July sometimes is almost completely empty except for the play director. When we looked at the centre of the city we found underuse was even more apparent. Most office building plazas were empty most of the time even at lunch on a beautiful day and it wasn't meant to be that way. The city had been giving bonuses, floor space bonuses to builders for providing plazas. If the builders did they could add more floors to their building, and so they did. They built the extra floors and got all that extra money and in return they gave these empty spaces. In other cities whether through the bonus provision or not builders seem to come up with the same kind of dreary, empty spaces.

But some plazas had lots of people like the Seagram. Suppose we could find out what it was that made the good ones work and the others not. We put the matter to the planning commission. They said if we could nail down the answers and back them up with facts they would draw up a new zoning resolution for open spaces. So we went to work. We set up cameras for time-lapse coverage of a cross section of spaces, about 14 plazas and three small parks, but our main technique was simple, direct observation. We made up maps for each of the spaces and then we would go around periodically and map where the people sat and what they were doing, what the time of day was, the temperature and so on and it doesn't take much longer to do this than to make a simple headcount but as you build up the record a number of patterns begin to appear. The first thing that strikes you is the extraordinary diversity of activity, people reading, eating, talking, playing games. The sociability is really rather important and we found that the proportion of people in groups can tell you a number of things. The most used plazas tend to have a higher proportion of people in twos and threes than the less successful ones but the most sociable plazas also have in absolute numbers the greatest number of individuals. A busy place for some reason seems to be the most congenial kind of place if you want to be alone or talk as this man is to oneself. The number one activity is people looking at other people but it is a point that is overlooked in many, many designs. Here are the girl watchers. Now they are a bit disdainful sort of looking down their nose as though the girls weren't quite worthy of their talents but it's all machismo. We have never, ever seen a girl watcher make a pass at a girl. We've seen very few others do that for that matter. For some reason there isn't much mixing. Those two blondes might as well be several miles away for all the attention, ostensible attention, that's going to be paid to them. Note the two men circling in the background. This is a rather characteristic pattern. We call it the travelling conversation and you will see them move in sort of an orbit ever circling right out in front of the plaza. Lovers. If you want to see the lovers people told us look in the back. We did, they weren't in there. They're out front. Most of the lovers that we spotted at Seagram's were usually to be found in the middle of the pool ledge, one side or the other, the most conspicuous of spots. This fellow is going to look at his watch to see if he can spare a bit more time. Another fine place is the corner. There is usually an audience there and one gets the feeling that the actors don't mind this in the slightest.

Let's look now at some of the physical features and how they affect use. Notice the narrow strip between the pool and the ledge. The architects purposely made it narrow. They didn't want people to be tempted to use the ledge and perhaps fall off. They didn't make it quite narrow enough. One can negotiate it, a little bit of trouble for older people which it tends to filter out, but younger people find it a definite challenge. The ledge has become one of the most popular of spots and attracts a rather rakish element.

At peak times the front ledge is the most heavily used especially by younger people who tend to the front. These elegantly simple steps are a very important feature. They are low and they're easy. They're easy to go up and down. They're also easy to sit on and then the corner has a right angle that's fine for groups but there's a problem. The corners of the steps are precisely where the main flow of people to and from the buildings can be found yet this is where people like to stand and to sit and to block the traffic. There is usually a few feet here and there for passage and though sometimes it does get a little difficult and you have to pick your way very carefully but it's a friendly kind of congestion and later things do clear up a bit. Now we come to another junction, the street corner. It has a social life of its own and as we saw a little bit earlier with those two orbiting executives it connects with the life of the plaza. The corner is a great place for impromptu conferences especially so around about two o'clock when the lunch groups break up.

When people stopped to talk they don't move off to one side, they move smack into the middle of a traffic stream. This corner in front of the Citicorp building has a very high frequency of such meetings and the number one spot for them is the geographic centre. Another favourite spot is the front of the steps leading to the subway and even at rush hour. A third is at the corner directly athwart the north/south pedestrian flow. Now these heavy flows of course are a reason why chance encounters are such a high probability here and why there's so many hellos and goodbyes and particularly protracted goodbyes. There's another kind of activity we call people just standing there alone. Life swirls about and they let it all pass by. They just stand there. Back to Seagram's. When we plotted the off-peak use we found that over the long haul this rear space is the most favoured. It's the best of both worlds. You can see the show up front, you're not cut off from it at all, but under those trees you feel protected. It's a little like being under the awning of a café.

As we move from the rear we see another aspect of the place that's quite fascinating, the movement of people across it. Choreography is wonderful and choreography really is the right word, the way people move, circle, stop, speed up, the colours they wear. There's the beauty that they must often sense themselves. You see none of this in architectural photographs, they're usually quite empty of people, but visually this movement is the ultimate test of a design and there's a lot of skill here. We've tracked people on scores of crossing patterns with a digital timer and never do they collide, a tiny hand signal, a brief retard, a tenth of a second, the timing is absolutely superlative. Think of the computers, the radar, it would take to make their equivalent.

Now what's not taking place? People don't often stop to talk in the middle of a large space. They like defined places, steps, edges, flag pole. Here's a map of a week's activity. The red squares are where people stop to talk, 51 instances in all, only a few were in the centre. We come to the question why do some plazas work and others not? We ranked 15 plazas by the average number of people sitting and running somewhere from around 170 down to about oh a handful, 20 or 30. Now most of these plazas are comparable in size. Why then the difference? Was it the amount of open space? No, if anything there's a reverse correlation. What about sittable space? And here we get a bit closer and had we ranked these in terms of qualitative sitting we would have a much clearer relationship. We check many other things, elevation, male/female ratio, space use and so on and so on, charts in stupefying succession but as we put them all together one major finding began to shine through and I now share it with you.

This might not strike you as an intellectual bombshell but this simple lesson is one that very few cities have ever heeded. They're tough places to sit in. And what's most aggravating are the number of plazas that would be excellent for sitting if only they weren't so high or wet or had fussy little railings placed to get you right in the small of the back. Here, another two inches and you'd be comfortable. Shrubbery and canted ledges, very useful for keeping people off but we found that people are very adaptable. Press down on your heel and you can do it. Sometimes you've got to play rough.

But as we found out people are very adaptable. Older people like to sit in the sun here. Can't have that. Management put in these stones and now the older people don't sit here anymore. This artifact is a design object the purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photographs. It has some utility as a bench but is usually placed in isolation. The dimensions are exquisitely wrong and not just for physical reasons important as they may be. Small benches are socially awkward. If there's a crowd people will sit but they're not very relaxed about it. So to the first recommendation make the place sittable. Minimum suggested requirement one linear foot of sitting space for every 30 square feet of open space. It's easy to meet. They did it at Seagram's by leaving it sittable. Inherently most places are or should be and for a lesson in this let's go to St. Mark's Square in Venice.

[ Bells Ringing ]

The chairs of the cafés are what you first notice. [ Bells Ringing ]

But look closer and you'll see that there is a great deal of sitting space built into the plaza in ledges and steps and not inadvertently either. Those early urban designers were way ahead of us in providing the simple amenities where the nobles once hatched their intrigues by the imbroglio as they call it. There are tourists but the sitting patterns are much the same. Moral, make the most of ledges especially the front row.

And make them two backsides deep. The point is not to double the number of sitters but to give them more choice and this is very important for their perception of crowding or not crowding. Here's an excellent example. Note how each surface can do double duty. Together they provide almost an infinity of sitting combinations.

Step ledges are good and they offer lots of choice. They go very well with grass, grass that you can sit on. Planters make good sitting if they're not too high as too many are. They should be low and they should be hospitable. Here's a ledge with swings and is equally popular front or back. A sitting table which revolves. The most prolifically sittable place is 77 Water Street, sometimes known as Swingers' Plaza. It has chairs, table, benches, sitting sculpture but it's the maze of ledges that make this place work so very well. And here are some of the swingers. Question? How many people is too many? The planning commission was concerned about this. The plazas were made more inviting might not they attract so many people as to befoul them. How could carrying capacity be determined? To get at these questions we studied ten very intensively used places among them thisledge at Seagram's. First we studied spacing. Here a little before noon is the beginning of a crowd. The men, you will note, are sitting quite close together even though there's a lot of extra space. As we saw earlier the step corner is a very high traffic area and here is where the buildup will be concentrated. As the place fills the dense areas will get denser very much as they do at beaches. We're going to see a time-lapse record of lunchtime at the ledge from noon until a little bit before two.

[ Stopwatch Ticking ]

Notice the very heavy turnover but notice also that a remarkable thing is taking place. Despite the heavy turnover the number of people is remaining quite constant. Here's a chart in a sort of piano player role of where and how long each person sat. It starts at 9 AM with two people.

From 12 to 2 we get the heavy use. Note that in the running total at the bottom the number of people stays between 19 and 21. Good spacing you might say. No, that doesn't really explain it. The spacing is erratic and even at the peak moments there's plenty of room for extra people, even groups of people, but they don't come. I think that what we are seeing is the result of an instinctive feel that people have for the number that's right for a place, the number that's right overall, and that is its effective capacity. To put it another way, capacity is self-levelling. Many people will tell you that the two pleasantest, quietest, least crowded places in New York are and Greenacre Park. They certainly are among the smallest. Paley is 42x100 feet, Greenacre 65x100. At peak times the density of leading plazas runs up to about 11 people per thousand square feet. Paley and Greenacre go almost off the chart. They are the most crowded by far and often quite noisy. In the mind's eye they are not. One's perception is of quiet, of peace, of choice. One of the things that we did to try and find out how come this rather interesting difference between perception and fact was the daily buildup of table use and here in this animated chart you will see the black dots are for men, the red for women. Notice by the way the tendency of men to take the front row and the women the rear. Now as the day goes on the patterns remain quite consistent and so they do day after day but this Olympian perspective can be rather misleading. What we see looking down is regularity. Now this is the truth but it's only a partial one. Get down to eye level the way people see the place and you don't see regularity. Instead you see sort of an amiable miscellany. People are placed this way and that. Some people are declaratively alone, others grouped around tables. Choices are always opening up. Now this is extremely high density right here. The people are very close to each other and yet the social distances are quite comfortable. In this particular case the social distance might be a little too close.

We come to that wonderful invention the movable chair. It's one of the reasons you have such a feeling of choice at places like Paley or Greenacre. You are doing the deciding. It's very interesting to watch how people manipulate chairs. Here you can sort of tell there's going to be rather aggressive movement. Now whatever the purpose of all this rearranging it does make for a rather pleasant social ritual and you'll see many variants of this often quite lengthy. Even when there is no apparent functional reason of any kind people move chairs. Watch this girl.

Now she's no more in the sun than she was before. Watch this fellow. Very unusual behaviour but this man is starting something. Soon we're going to have a game of musical chairs. Just why these men all started to move one can never know but they did.

The interesting thing though is about four minutes after the beginning of this all the chairs were back where they started from. Fixed individual seats don't work very well. For lovers loveseats are all right. The distances are quite comfortable but not for most people. Furthermore chairs like this are telling you you sit here and you sit there. The most important thing about a space is its relationship to the street and Paley is a fine example. People do speak of it as a refuge, as a place to escape from the city. This is very wrong. Paley is an intensely urban place and one of its great assets is the vigorous street life out in front of it and for that matter within it as many people will be entering and leaving and touring the inside of Paley as you will find on many a busy sidewalk. Passersby are important too. About half will turn in and look and about a half of them will smile. I haven't calculated a smile index, that would be much too solemn but this visual enjoyment, this secondary use, is every bit as important as the primary use. Paley is a site, a place to show people, to point to with pride, to discuss.

Children seem particularly entranced with Paley.

But we've noticed there's quite a tendency for them to run in and accelerate as they come to the steps. Passersby will often do a double take and then walk on in. There are just a few easy steps. You don't have to make a decision. You're almost drawn in. And here with older people you'll sometimes see as with children a slight acceleration as they go up the steps

The vestibule is a social place in its own right. Now those girl watchers swilling beer actually spoke to these girls. You will see mothers with their children.

People just standing there, waiting. It's a popular place to meet people. You'll see people meeting for again 100% conversations. Here's an example of what we call reciprocal gestures but when two men, two people are sort of getting together in their conversation there seems to be a tendency for one person to make a move and then after say a seven, eight second pause to the other to reciprocate.

Ah, he did it. Itinerant musicians have a very keen sense of place and here this cello player is setting up at one of the best of them.

[ Cello Playing ]

We've been looking at places that worked with a street. Now let's look at a directly contrary approach, a self-contained megastructure. These are a sort of urban fortress. Their common denominator is that they take you away from the street. Here at Houston Centre you're going up, up, up. The plazas and the terraces are two and three levels above the street. And from the street you are completely insulated. You can drive from the suburbs in the morning into that garage there, walk through the skyways to the office and spend the whole day without ever having to set foot in Houston at all. This is its streetscape, no stores, no windows, not many pedestrians either for that matter. Street level is for cars. The one activity is a bank window for people in cars. Here's Renaissance Centre in Detroit, very striking and many attractions within but what does it say at street level? Look at that huge berm across its entry, all that's lacking is a portcullis. Come in and be safe from Detroit it says. Downtown Los Angeles, Plaza, successful, inside. A few blocks away Atlantic Richfield plaza, very handsome, but what's happened to the street? Where are the stores? Where are the windows? Where are the people? Going down, two subterranean levels of shopping in balmy Los Angeles. In the next block the Hotel Bonaventure dramatically scaled to the freeway but not to the pedestrian. Look at the wall that it turns to the city. Have you ever seen a more brutal rejection of the street or a more unnecessary one? Ironically 20 miles away at Disneyland people pay good money to enjoy a replica of a regular old-fashioned street with shops and windows and doors at street level.

Thus to a point about plazas. Unless there is a compelling reason don't sink them way down or put them way up. They get lost like this elevated plaza in Seattle. Most sunken plazas are empty, near empty most of the time. The action is up top on the street.

Well what about Rockefeller plaza? It's sunken and it's very popular, so it is, but look carefully and you will see that most of the people are up top looking down. It's an amphitheater and the people down below are the show.

Here's another exception that proves the rule. This is the plaza of the First National Bank of Chicago, sunken, no mistake about that but very popular. On a nice day you'll find well over 1000 people enjoying themselves here. It does all of the basics quite well. There's lots and lots of sitting space and it too functions as an amphitheater. As the place fills up the steps will become a mezzanine and there will be a show down below.

To understand let's go back to the corner and follow the passersby. Now as they come abreast you'll see as we saw at Paley lots of visual secondary use, some people pausing to look in and then going on, others pausing sort of drifting down to the plaza and the whole usage begins to build layer by layer, people looking at people looking at other people. We come to a key person, the undesirable. It is for fear of him that spikes are put on ledges and benches made too short to sleep on. In actual fact these people are harmless and sometimes very well behaved. Most often they are to be found in the places where other people are not. Then there are the people who do odd things like drumsticks who happens to be a compulsive cleaner upper of litter. In many ways the odd people do a service to the rest of us. They reassure us of our own normality. In well used public places people are tolerant of the odd ones and life goes on with little fuss or trouble. This is Pershing Square in Los Angeles. In the morning you will see many older men and some who move to a beat of their own but they don't hurt anybody, it's not unsafe, and later in the middle of the day office workers will come out with their brown bags and there will be a nice coexistence. And here is a pigeon lady. Every square should have one. Here's a place that is dangerous. in the middle of New York. It's green and spacious and the cops patrol it in pairs as well they should. Real undesirables, muggers and dope dealers have made it their territory. They've been able to because it is cut off from the street by fences and walls, very pleasant to these tree-shaded paths but you can get a feeling of entrapment in them. Even a shuffling derelict poses a threat that he wouldn't elsewhere. To make a place like this work you must unfence it. For guarding plazas television cameras are often favoured. Their usefulness seems to be largely symbolic. They reassure management. They don't see very much, nothing beats a human being. Safe and successful places usually have a kind of mayor. Here's one of the best, Joe Hardy of Exxon. He's good at spotting potential trouble but what he likes best is helping people, two girls for example who would like to have their picture taken, and that's one reason why there isn't much trouble.

People do like the sun. They so visibly like it, men as well as women, that we were pretty sure that sunlight would be a major factor, the major factor perhaps, in plaza use and that a southern exposure would be almost a necessity. And for a while it looked as if we were right. Our early time lapse you'll recall showed a very strong correlation between sitters and sun. That was in May. As time went on, June, July, August, the correlation vanished. People sat anywhere, sun or shade. Paley gave us another lesson. It lost part of its sun to a new office building. People came just as many as before. Sun was clearly not the ruling factor. Sun is most important in nippy weather when the rays make the difference between sitting comfortably or not sitting. At Greenacre Park the upper terrace is warmed by infrared heaters. Less costly is protection from the wind. Where it's provided you can have a sort of nice sun theatre. What hurts most is not so much the absence of sun but of light. If we can't get the sun directly perhaps we can borrow it. The same new buildings that are cutting off the sun from some places are reflecting it into others. As a matter of fact some of the city's pleasantest lighting effects are from this kind of bounce light particularly in the late afternoon. The new Citicorp building reflects sun with such a wallop that in one receding block trees are growing much faster than they did before. This black brick building bounces a surprising amount of light and guess where to? Paley Park. It's a very soft, pleasant light.

Here's a plaza with the northern exposure that gets lots of light thanks to the building across the way. The best light at Seagram's is by reflection, some of it on the second, third or fourth bounce. All of these effects are quite unplanned of course but they do suggest that there are really some fascinating potentials for urban design, sun easements for example.

Water is a wonderful amenity in the city and it's an element that designers and developers are really doing quite well with. We're getting water walls, we're getting waterfalls, fountains, lots of spray and here's a brook running through a lobby. One of the nicest things about these waterworks is the sound of them.

[ Running Water ]

Sometimes it's very loud. This water wall at Paley is about 75 decibels but it's white sound, very resting and it masks traffic noise and other people's conversations. Another thing about water is the look and feel of it. I've always felt that the water at Seagram's is particularly liquid and I suppose the reason is that it's so very accessible. You can stick your hand in it and splash about and nobody will rush up to stop you. You just know that girl has got to put her foot in the water.

Some cities put water before people and then tell them not to use it. This isn't right and it isn't right to take a grand old fountain like Chicago's Buckingham and put an electric fence around it. This girl was living dangerously perhaps but water ought to be used. This fellow wants to cool his feet and why not? Forbidden.

On this Denver bank plaza there's water that is good to look at and there's also water in which people can wade and splash about and no one will fret over it, praise to the bank. This splendid fountain in Portland dares people and if this were taken in summer you'd see teenagers clamouring all over it. It's obviously dangerous. Lawrence Halpern designed it to be obviously dangerous and there's been scarcely an accident.

[ Rushing Water ]

Here is some vicarious water. This tunnel at McGraw-Hill small park splashes you but you don't get wet. It's fun and it's become quite a tourist attraction. Another thing we are at last doing is opening up access to our waterfronts. This is Jeanette Park on the East River, part of an office building complex. This is the South Street seaport. It's an excellent example of how simple elements make a great urban space. It has all of the elements, nice space, places to sit, a nice view and plenty of people. Louisville has come back to the Ohio River with this rather elegant Belvedere.

[ Horn Blowing ] The prize goes to San Antonio. It took what was little more than a drainage ditch and turned it into a river corridor that goes right through the heart of the city. It's lined with a walkway, cafés and sitting spaces and it's a perfectly wonderful example of good enclosure. You feel very comfortable here.

Trees are so beneficent for a city it's a wonder we haven't planted more and we certainly have plenty of good practical reasons to do so, microclimate, shade, transpiration, cooling, beauty, so fourth, but now we have a new reason. What with all the travertine that architects are laying about the glare index of cities is soaring. We should make the most of this and press for many more to tree. New York's new zoning now requires builders to plant far more in the way of street trees and more trees within the plaza itself. Where possible they ought to be planted in groves quite close together. Now this produces a fine canopy. As we noted at Seagram the places that people like best are those which are open to the action but are slightly recessed, slightly protected. You get a cavey feeling and just a few honey locust overhead will do it.

If you want to see the place with activity put in food. At almost every lively plaza you'll find a pushcart vendor. This man has been at Seagram's for years at 52nd and Park. Even in the wintertime when he moves over the steam manhole. Merchants don't like vendors and they are always trying to get the police to shoo them away. Some cities don't allow outdoor eating at all, but the vendors are providing a service that people want and they sometimes perform a social function too. Often they are the mayors, the rendezvous points, the gossip stations as here at Charles Centre in Baltimore and a word with them is part of the day.

Here's a little study in food dynamics. At the Exxon mini park the management experimented with a food cart. It attracted people. Here's one of the first impulse buys.

[ City Noise ]

The activity, in turn, attracted other vendors. More people came to the park. Encouraged the management next put in an outdoor café. The optical leverage in these things is really quite amazing. All they take really is a few simple props, some tables, some chairs, but put up the umbrellas and bring on the people and the effect is really quite striking. It's a shill effect. The people who eat usually attract far more people.

[ City Noise ]

Built-in snack bars are a great draw. At Paley and Greenacre parks they provide good food, good coffee too. They do it at reasonable prices and they make a modest profit doing it. New York zoning now favours such facilities. Food kiosks, pass-through counters used to be classified as obstructions. Now they're amenities. Outdoor cafés are specifically encouraged and developers are allowed to use up to 20% of the open space of the plaza for these cafés. The first café after the zoning passed was put up by the city itself. This windy space next to the municipal building was made into a kind of street festival.

[ City Noise ] The first concessionaires were from Little Italy. Later it was Chinese food and soul food. But the best thing about the café has been a shrewd use of space. The person who organized the café, then deputy Joey Hammer, laid out the tables and chairs with a tyrant's eye of a good hostess. She didn't spread them out, she compressed them, and the walkway was compressed also so waiting in line or threading your way to a table you almost have to meet someone. I've never seen so many people saying hello and goodbye and being introduced. It's the first time there's been a meeting ground for people from all of the departments and it's splendid for politicking and it's splendid for younger people too. I wonder how many marriages can be traced back to this café? Another lesson that was learned was the utility of the simple wastebasket or rather lots and lots of them. When there are enough people are really quite conscientious in using them. It was also found important to make concessionaires keep up the cleaning job. Most of them used children to do this but they did a rather effective job.

We've gone over the basic factors but there's one more and for lack of a better term I call it triangulation. By this I mean that characteristic of a public space that can bring people together, strangers. It's usually an external stimulus of some kind. It could be a physical feature or a happening. Here's a good example. These people are having a great time. Something is going on and strangers are beginning to talk to each other about it. Two bank robbers have been caught and the police are searching them. Now that's a little extreme example perhaps, here's a more typical one. This mime has attracted a good crowd and so far no cop. He makes fun of people. Here he goes up to some junior executives and draws a square. Everybody laughs. Here comes the cop.

[ City Noise ]

It's a nice moment, a city kind of moment.

It doesn't make too much difference if the act is skillful or corny. It will draw a crowd in less than a minute usually and strangers will act as though they were not. What the performer does best is to provide a connection between them. What are they looking at? This again is at Seagram's. This time it's a sculpture. What in the world will they think of next some people will say. A sculpture by Mark DuSuvero and people certainly reacted to it. They argued about it, they went up to touch it, strangers started talking about it. This is DuBuffet's Four Trees on the Chase Plaza. This sculpture draws people to it. They like to walk underneath it, to touch it, to look up at it. They like to stand around it. It does a lot for the rest of the plaza. The scale is just right for this rather large space. It is a very sociable element. Here's a very similar combination on the Federal Plaza in Chicago. Here is a morality tale. This is Louise Nevelson's Night Presence. When she gave it to the city it was placed in front of the walkway to the Zoo. People sat on it, they ate lunch on it. They looked at it and argued about it. They touched it almost surreptitiously to see what it was made of, cork and steel.

It didn't block the pedestrian flow. In a sort of Venturi effect it seemed to stimulate the flow, to attract people to it, around it

No longer, the statue was moved to upper . Nobody sits on it anymore or touches it. Usefulness is not the only measure of sculpture in street furniture but it certainly doesn't hurt. As this woman is demonstrating what better use through a glass curtain wall and why not shelves? Here's a wall with this digital clock. I've never been able to read the time here but it's a lot of fun to look at.

See if you can figure this one out. The real sun will show you the clue. It's a painting by Richard Ott.

Here's a nice one up in Boston. Here's an inspired example of triangulation, St. Peter's, a church with a window to the street. Passersby are drawn to it and they talk to each other about what they see.

[ Background Talking ]

Our recommendations, after many stormy meetings and public hearings, are incorporated in 's new zoning code. The main points we've noted, sitting space, close linkage with the street, trees and food not made mandatory alas we lost on that one but strongly recommended. Another provision requires that at least 50% of the buildings' frontage must be for retail activity not just for banks or blank walls. There must be access for the disabled, ramps, easy steps, in effect better access for everyone. The plaza must tie closely to the street, be no more than three feet beneath street level or three feet above. There are stiff maintenance requirements and the zoning enables and encourages the rejuvenation of existing plazas. As a next step the commission's excellent urban design group came up with comparable requirements for residential construction. As a result small neighbourhood parks. One of the most encouraging things that's been taking place has been the livening up of existing plazas. The New York Telephone Company put in this snack bar and lots of tables and chairs. They are very well used, so well indeed that there is no vacuum anymore for undesirables. In other existing spaces cafés have been going up and the spaces are much the better for it. More benches are being put out in front of office buildings and stores. The ones closest to the activity, bus stop, store entrance, are the ones that people like best, older people especially. The closer to the action the more they like it. We're also seeing a spontaneous invigoration of a number of public places. One is the plaza area around the 60th Street and Central Park. It's always been a pleasant place but now as office construction has moved up to it there's a big new constituency and on weekdays it's jammed. Vendors of every kind are there. Shish kebab, with or without pita, falafel, fruit, ham and eggs. There is usually a lot of chit chat back and forth.

[ Background Talking ]

What's that the fellow asks? Chinese beef, he answers. Now they're hooked. It draws more of a crowd and that draws more people. He usually has a cycle of about eight minutes on this and mostly it's very much of a show. The beef by the way is quite good. Now the cops have to give tickets and so they do rather desultory but mostly it's live and let live.

[ Music ]

Frederick Law Olmsted said that Central Park should be a great gathering place for all kinds of people and so it is here. You need a pretty good size sidewalk for book stalls but they do busy a place up rather nicely. These particular book stalls the first few years of operation barely broke even. It takes time to build a market but now they're doing quite well. Another great place is the front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The steps are fine for sitting. As you might expect the steps right --, it's smack in front of the entrance are the most favourite but there are movable chairs as well and they're out 24 hours a day seven days a week. People have been so good at not taking them that the museum figures it's cheaper just to leave them out and replace the few that are lost. The water is to be used. The museum is quite hospitable to entertainers and vendors. Some of the neighbours are not and call the cops so the chasing of the vendors has become a stock act in the street theatre out in front of the steps.

The vendors are a very resourceful lot and they will be back.

[ City Noise ]

Question? From city to city are the basic factors pretty much the same? Answer, generally yes but there is one key variable, scale. This is Philip Square in Toronto, a very big place but its proportions are right for the buildings around it. Here's another well scaled place, the park that Seattle built over its freeway, it's quite large too but it's experienced really on foot as a series of smaller spaces. Now we come to a smaller city, Lansing, Michigan. The best part of its new pedestrian mall is this one square, not very big, but quite comfortable in relation to its surroundings, very pleasant. The tendency is to over scale. Here is the mall of Riverside, California. Sometimes it is almost empty. Cities like Riverside, which are low density to begin with, need to concentrate and this mall disperses, over a fairly large space, activity and people and stores which had they been compressed might have come together in a critical mass. Here is a critical mass. This is Fountain Square, Cincinnati, which covers actually considerably less space than the mall that we just saw and there are many, many more people in it. It's probably the best public square in the country. It has a close relationship to the street, it is well enclosed by the surrounding buildings. The designers have provided all kinds of choice, different kinds of sitting space, different kinds of places to eat. It's well programmed with activity but most important of all they put the space in the very centre of town not five or six blocks away but at the 100% location and this is why it is such a unifying place. Cincinnati comes together here. And you can touch the water. A public square that's indoors, the Crystal Court of the IDS Centre in Minneapolis. It's nicely transparent, no black walls here, connects well with the streets and the stores and buildings around it. On the second level there are walkways. They've become quite a notable feature helped by the fierce Minnesota winter climate and by very heavy pedestrian flows. Some smaller cities are copying the walkways but without the heavy flows or the weather they should look again. This place works because of its fundamentals and they are the same for a space with a roof as one without. Like Fountain Square this is right smack in the centre of town. It shows in the people and that's why this is such a good place for looking at them. There are all kinds, old people, young people, blue-collar, white-collar. You get quite a different feeling here than you do in a suburban shopping centre. Here you are at the crossroads. In the old city of Boston next to Faneuil Hall some ancient market buildings have been made into the most successful marketplace in the country and a very urban one. There are lots of highly specialized shops and every conceivable kind of food. The place is crowded and it's a bit messy. People sit all over the place. Notice how they are sitting on the steps especially. It's quite energy-efficient. These public spaces open up to the outside and in good weather these garage type windows are rolled back to the open air and almost always even in the coldest weather people will be sitting and eating outdoors. What we have here is the very opposite of the self-contained mega structure. The market is very much a part of downtown. The street, can you see the street going right through it? It was only after we had studied many other places that I realized we could have learnt all of the lessons right here on 101st Street. It's an excellently scaled block, a comfortably sized space very nice and close with lots of people and food, food. Varied social activity too. Water? Yes, and you can touch it, you can aim it, you can slosh around in it.

[ City Noise ]

Sitting, the best kind of space, slightly elevated. The lot at the corner is used for games but the street itself is the number one area for recreation including that very popular form, the polishing for the car. This block has its problems but it works as a place. Here we are back at Seagram. It's a hazy, muggy afternoon and incidentally that's the kind that always seems to bring people out even more so than the nippy ones. A group of music students are giving a little impromptu concert. Some executives are still conferring. It's a very nice time just before two o'clock when everybody's about ready to close up.

[ Music ]

And so we end our film on plazas not on the plaza but on the street itself and that's where we should. The street is the river of life for the city. We come to these places not to escape but to partake of it.

[ Music ]