The Last Landscape

by William H. Whyte

The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use. Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.

Genres: Nature, Urbanism, Cities

Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (1917 - 12 January 1999) was an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher.

Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and died in New York City in 1999. An early graduate of St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, he graduated from Princeton University and then served in Marine Corps. In 1946 he joined Fortune magazine.
Whyte wrote a 1956 bestseller titled The Organization Man after Fortune magazine sponsored him to do extensive interviews on the CEOs of corporations such as General Electric and Ford.
While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to use direct observation to describe behavior in urban settings. With research assistants wielding still cameras, movie cameras, and notebooks, Whyte described the substance of urban public life in an objective and measurable way.
These observations developed into the Street Life Project, an ongoing study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, and eventually to Whyte's book called City: Rediscovering the Center (1988). City presents Whyte's conclusions about jaywalking, 'schmoozing patterns,' the actual use of urban plazas, appropriate sidewalk width, and other issues. This work remains valuable because it's based on careful observation, and because it contradicts other conventional wisdom, for instance, the idea that pedestrian traffic and auto traffic should be separated.
Whyte also worked closely with the renovation of Bryant Park in New York City.
Whyte served as mentor to many, including the urban-planning writer Jane Jacobs, Paco Underhill, who has applied the same technique to measuring and improving retail environments, Dan Biederman of Bryant Park Corporation, who led the renovation of Bryant Park and the Business Improvement District movement in New York City, and Fred Kent, head of the Project for Public Spaces.
His books include: Is Anybody Listening? (1952), Securing Open Spaces for Urban America (1959), Cluster Development (1964), The Last Landscape (1968; "about the way metropolitan areas look and the way they might look"), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980; plus a companion film of the same name in 1988), and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988).

Reviews

[Slagle Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers a fascinating and informative assessment on mid-20th Century thinking about landscape planning and preservation. The author was a professional in the field and also an accomplished writer who made the subject accessible for his readers. Though it was copyrighted over five decades ago, many of the projects (roads, greenbelt cities and architectural practices) of the period and earlier part of the century still exist in one formor another. We’ve seen many of the practices advocated in the book brought to fruition and this book enhances our depth of understanding into the thought, planning and expense that went into many a modern American landmark. Urban and rural planning, architecture and economic trends are put forth in a plain spoken, elegant and even (at times) humorous narrative that makes for very compelling reading for anyone interested in the subject. I am looking forward to reading more by this author.

[Duy Bao · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am a student from viet nam , and i want to read this book

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

For those of you that would find this an engaging and useful book - all five of you...not all five of you on goodreads.com, but all five of you at least somewhat sentient beings within the english speaking world - I beseech you to leave a review that will entice me to read the second half of this book. I aquired this for a dollar or two at a library book discard sell and, a couple years later after reading reference after reference to William's (I think his last name is spelled "Whyte" yet, on this particular website, the box overlaps the name of the author and if you click above to look at it, it erases everything you've written - thus my lack of comment on The Historiography of Modern Architecture which was, no doubt, pithy and important but was eradicated by this stupid interface! Fool me once goodreads.com...) book about Organization Man I started reading this as it was on hand. So I got about half way through, I seem to recall, 500 pages of William expounding upon the legalese of how the few interested people circa 1967-ish might go about saving swaths of rural land in the state of Maryland from being subsumed by sprawl. Perhaps it was because of the author's reasoned, somewhat banal, actuarial-like approach to the issue combined with my assumption that 30-something years later - as I'm reading this - every piece of acreage he's talking about has probably been paved over 8 times, I found it depressing in so many ways. He delves into various tactics of land aquisition that has perhaps proved beneficial since. He mentions something called a "Fee-simple" strategy I seem to recall, and perhaps he invented this? And perhaps this has proven, subsequently, to be some major tool for aquiring land away from avaricious developers in such states as Vermont and Oregon? I dunno...I'm a redneck from Texas/Arkansas where everything is simple, yet doesn't ultimately work. And, as I said so many ages ago at the top line of this run-on paragraph, let me know why I need to find my copy, blow the sundry dust bunnies off of it, and read it to get something out of it. And don't tell me that it's more important than Organization Man. I did eventually read it and I'll soon comment on the frequent overuse of that one by people who obviously haven't read it!

[John M.]

I am slowly making my way through this book due to time constraints. It contains compelling stuff, though. Whyte was ahead of his time in applying European principles to save urban and suburban open space. One of my recent internships involved writing a literature review of economic impact analyses of multiuse trails and greenways. This book from 1968 is relevant to research being done in 2015 as Whyte extols the values of linear open space in the urban environment. Also, the appropriation of obsolete rights-of-way such as abandoned roads, railroads, and canals is happening all around us, just as Whyte suggested it should.

[Sarah B.]

author recommended by scott doyle

[John Andrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to be interested in rural planning to appreciate this book but, if you are, it is a really wise and well-informed book. I am!