The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1988) [video]

William Whyte should be required reading for anyone building an app intending to facilitate interaction. I probably reference his book (http://www.amazon.com/Social-Life-Small-Urban-Spaces/dp/0970...) more than any book on actual product design when working on social products @ Facebook!

This is a wonderful video! Thankyou.

A lot of the comments remind me of patterns from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I'm sure many people on HN know this book from the preface to Design Patterns, but if you've never flipped through it you really should - any single pattern contains a great deal of insight into how we live in the world.

Triva: The A Pattern Language book influenced Will Wright to create a game that would later evolve into SimCity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)#Car...

Very good video. Btw. the video is from 1979 (see credits), not 1988 (archive.org title).

Do urban architects know about this video and the A Pattern Language book? Has the school of thought changed in recent years? Has the introduction of CAD tools changed/simplified the architecture style?