Abstract: William Whyte originally hypothesized that the presence of people in a public space would attract more people. Contemporary planners now refer to “sticky streets” as places where pedestrians are compelled to linger and enjoy vibrant public life. We test the hypothesis that adding users to a public space will attract more people using an experimental design with confederates to add pedestrian movement and staying activity in a residential street for 45 randomly selected hours. We observed staying behavior by gender with and without our intervention. We find that the addition of public users reduced the total number of people staying in our study area, especially among women. We find that women’s right to the city may be constrained by the mere presence of other individuals, even in safe spaces and during daylight hours. Our findings suggest that Whyte’s claim is not universal, but depends on the conditions of a particular site.
Keywords: behavior, field experiment, gender, public life study, public space, urban design
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In sum, our results suggest that increasing the number of users in public space has a differentiated effect among males and females. On average, men may be more likely to be attracted to places with more public users, while females may be less likely to stay. However, the difference in number of people staying in the public space is statistically significant only among women. We do not find evidence that the addition of public users increased total staying behavior.
Since the work of Jane Jacobs (1961) and William H. Whyte (1980), urban-ists have thought carefully about how to entice people to stay in well-designed urban plazas, parks and streets. With the work of Jan Gehl and others, the study of public life has emerged as a distinct subfield, with its own methods and tools (Ciocoletto, 2014; Gehl & Svarre, 2013). A major premise of research on public life is that people attract other people. More than anything else, people enjoy watching other people (Toderian, 2014). Well-designed spaces are those that succeed at enticing others to linger, stay longer and in this way, help to build vibrant and inclusive communities. The presence or absence of people in a public space may be interpreted as an indicator of its quality, and these ideas have influenced the design of public spaces, such as plazas, parks, and streets.
We examined the behavioral effect of adding more people to a pedestrian-ized street in a residential community. We test the hypothesis that adding people to the public space might make it more attractive to others. We con-ducted our experiment in a high-quality and pedestrianized street that offers formal and informal seating. We find that the addition of public users reduced the total number of people staying in our study area, especially among women.We observe a strong differential effect by gender in which adding people to a space may invite more males while simultaneously push away females. Our results show that women and men perceive public space differently, and these different perceptions translate into different behavioral responses. We find additional evidence that women’s right to the city is restricted in comparison to men’s. Importantly, this remains true even in high-quality, pedestrianized and safe places. This suggests that gendered spaces are not limited to those areas that are clearly perceived to be unsafe, poorly lit, or otherwise perceived as dangerous for women. Rather even in safe spaces, during day-light hours, women’s right to the city may be constrained by the mere presence of other individuals.Our experimental design does not allow us to identify the underlying factors or mechanisms that might explain the gender difference in the use of the public space. However, the literature already identifies the elements that may explain how the experience of the public space is different for men and women. It is clear that perceptions of safety and the opportunities for social interaction in public areas are conditioned by gender.Our results appear to contradict Whyte’s assertion that people attract peo-ple. Yet we cannot refute this claim for all sites and conditions. Whether our findings would hold in public spaces that are more social in nature, such as plazas or commercial streets, remains an open question. At the very least, we find that Whyte’s claim is not universal, but depends on the conditions of a particular site. It is possible that the particular geometry or conditions of our study site may have contributed to the observed results.
Our results bolster Whyte’s claim that people have an intuitive sense of the carrying capacity of a public space. In his observational work, he noticed that each site had a maximum number of people that it would support, and people would intuitively move somewhere else once that level had been reached. It appears that our intervention reached or surpassed the intuitive carrying capacity of our site. It also seems that men and women perceive density differently, and consequently have different density thresholds regarding what density levels are tolerable. In short, our results are consistent with Whyte’s notion of carrying capacity but there are likely to be differences between genders on what the intuitive carrying capacity might be.
We are intrigued by Whyte’s notion that we have an intuitive sense of the right number of people is to occupy a space. As noted, this intuitive notion is contingent on gender, but probably other cultural notions and tastes as well. It is also possible that these cultural notions or our perceptions of safety in public space might be evolving, potentially as a result of changing norms or our use of technology in public space. For example, an underlying assumption driving the sticky streets hypothesis is that we enjoy watching other people. When Whyte studied public users in New York, this was certainly true, and people watching was a New York pastime. Surveys of visitors to Central Park in 1982 showed that people watching was the most popular passive activity in Central Park, followed by relaxation, thinking and reading (Barlow Rogers, 1987). Times have changed and perhaps emerging cultural norms are less tolerant of people watching behavior than in the past. Younger generations may feel less comfortable with watching others or being watched, resulting in different behavioral responses to others in public space. If indeed there are changing cultural norms, we would expect to observe these differences by age (Aoki & Downes, 2003). We did not include age in our head-counts of staying behavior, leaving this unresolved in our study. Does the behavioral response of increasing pedestrian and staying behavior have het-erogenous effects by age as well as by gender? Are younger generations less interested in people watching and more attracted to the use of electronic devices? Our results merely raise more questions about under which conditions would we observe different effects. How can planners estimate or predict the carrying capacity of a particular site? What simple design interventions may increase or decrease perceived carrying capacity? What can be done to reduce the gender gap in terms of perception of safety, sense of belonging and staying behavior?
More work is needed to identify the factors that explain people’s decisions around the use of public space. It would be particularly useful to have meth-ods for estimating the carrying capacity of particular sites, as Whyte suggests, or the characteristics of spaces that may make adding people tolerable or desirable. It may also be worth considering how experimental designs may assist in answering these questions. Field experiments on questions about public space remain rare, yet have untapped potential. Field experiments may complement other research methods that aim to understand individual choices, movements and staying behavior in public. Learning when and why certain places are attractive and welcoming to both women and men will provide valuable insights for the theory and practice of urban design and planning.
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