On Refusing the Refuge of the Past
Two men stand in a public plaza, chatting. One rests his foot up on a small step. After a short pause, the other puts his foot up on the step too. An onlooker says, “Ah, he did it.” The onlooker sounds comforted. He hoped that would happen.
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). Courtesy of Direct Cinema Ltd.
This is a scene from William H. Whyte’s 1980 documentary The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which Anthology Film Archives has recently digitally restored. Whyte, a sociologist and the film’s narrator, is the onlooker, calmed by the man mimicking his conversation partner with the help of the public steps of Paley Park in New York City. Whyte created this documentary as a companion to his book of the same name, both of which are still beloved in urban planning circles and seek to find out why “some [city spaces] work for people, and some do not.”[1] His primary research method is people watching, his love of which is evident in his attentive, round, delighted voice as he narrates his footage and findings. What drives the film is Whyte’s desire to encourage the building of public spaces that prioritize people above all else and facilitate relaxation, conversation, chance meetings, romance, play, whimsy: community.
Throughout the film, there is an unstated but powerful premise that a healthy society is one in which people engage with friends and lovers and strangers in public. The film’s lens takes pleasure in witnessing examples of this marker of vitality: people stopping to chat in the middle of foot traffic, lovers kissing out in the open, men sitting on benches, and “girl watching.” All of this gains a degree of importance when viewing the film in 2025 in the midst of the second Trump administration, an administration aggressively keen on remaking America in Donald Trump’s vision of greatness.
Like Whyte, Trump understands that the design and use of public spaces tells us something about the character and strength of a society. Despite crime reaching a 30-year low in Washington, DC, Trump recently deployed National Guard troops and federal officers from other agencies to the city (and even more recently to Memphis).[2] Tellingly, they’re patrolling not the neighborhoods with above-average crime in DC, but the high-profile public spaces of the city, like the National Mall with all its monuments, Union Station, and Dupont Circle.[3] Defending the administration’s actions, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller insisted, “For the first time in their lives, [the public] can use the parks, they can walk on the streets.”[4] Yet fewer people are using public spaces in DC since the deployment. Throughout the city, foot traffic is down. Tourism and restaurant reservations are down, too.[5] The deployment is driving the people out of the public.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces makes an optical case for the visual factors that lead to vital public spaces. We see a group sitting on the steps of a park attracting more and more people to linger nearby. We see a small crowd that formed around a street performer grow into a bigger crowd. We see people wanting to watch and be watched. Yet unlike the documentary’s happy, engaged crowds, it is now the National Guard under Trump who is both a visual omnipresence and the watcher of the public. Trump is using these troops and other masked federal officers to signal that they—and by extension, he—are the ones who should be doing the watching. And with less of the public feeling safe and welcome to inhabit urban spaces, everyday people are now robbed of their roles as actors and observers, further depriving them of the joyful, spontaneous public moments many of these spaces were designed to facilitate.
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). Courtesy of Direct Cinema Ltd.
In general, the use of public spaces across the United States has been declining. In a study inspired in part by the work of Whyte, researchers compared the footage in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces with videos they captured of the same public locations 30 years after the documentary was filmed. Here is what they found: walking speeds have increased, hanging out in groups has decreased, spending time alone in public has decreased as well, all of which would have deeply saddened Whyte.[6] Though of course there is still person-to-person engagement in urban spaces, one could imagine Whyte narrating this new footage and saying, “Ah, come on,” as the majority of people walk past each other without stopping, waiting and waiting for them to engage with a fellow citymate.
Whyte’s documentary is now forty-five years old. Nowhere in it must he address social media or what has come to be known as the loneliness epidemic, giving the film in places an air of nostalgia.[7] In a sweet, ironic moment, Whyte discusses how to get a crowd gathering in public. He tells us it helps if there’s an “external feature” of some kind for strangers to bond over, like bank robbers getting caught by the police, after which passersby can stop and chat and say things like, “I can’t believe that happened here.” Whyte then admits that his example is “a little extreme.” But would a thwarted bank robbery be extreme enough to draw an engaged crowd in 2025? Perhaps not.
Perhaps nowadays external features must be grander and more cosmic to bring a crowd together, like the solar eclipse last year that drew millions of Americans outdoors into public spaces.[8] Yet even then, the public was staring off-planet, masses of individuals engaging more with a distant star than with the people beside them. Whyte, I assume, would find all of this to be a sign that we’re failing at cultivating successful public spaces.
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). Courtesy of Direct Cinema Ltd.
On August 28th, Trump signed an executive order titled “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” expanding on his vision of what it means to live in a strong society.[9] The order not only declares classical architecture to be the government’s “preferred architecture,” but it also rewrites the category itself. The executive order broadly and inaccurately redefines classical architecture to fit Trump’s whims, placing the 20th-century Art Deco movement into the same bucket as Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architecture and design.
The rhetoric of the executive order pays lip service to how the Founders of America wanted federal buildings to “encourage civic virtue,” akin to the ideals of the Roman Republic. Yet fantasizing himself a modern-day Caesar, Trump is most focused on promoting an architecture redolent of the Roman Empire, one that “commands respect.” He admires buildings that straightforwardly project to the public “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability.”[10] For Trump, greatness lies in the past, much like how it did for the twentieth-century dictator Benito Mussolini, who evoked Rome’s imperial history in fascist architecture to promote his idea of Italian greatness.[11] The past, it seems, is where Trump wants people to focus their attention instead of on the present.
Decadent writers and artists of the late nineteenth century share with Trump a love of looking back, especially upon antiquity and the Renaissance. The Decadents, however, largely viewed this as a sign of a weak society. Unlike Trump, their gaze toward the past was an honest acknowledgement that they found their present to be seriously lacking in intrigue and worth. Walter Pater, the nineteenth-century critic and essayist, wrote in his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance an explanation as to why he believed the period was superior to his own:
“[In the fifteenth century] artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.”[12]
To Pater, a remarkable society is one in which thinkers feel compelled to engage with their own time, with their own people.
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). Courtesy of Direct Cinema Ltd.
In March of this year, Saturday Night Live aired the sketch “Big Dumb Line,” which plays like a perverse evolution of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.[13] In it, SNL cast members and actress Mikey Madison wait in the titular big dumb line to experience a viral trend they saw on TikTok. They’re not entirely sure what the wait is for. They’re out in public, but they’re engaging with the thought of what’s to come at the end of the line, not with the people and city around them. They talk about the line, not much else. They’re conscious of little besides the passing minutes and their frustration. They behave as if, out in public, they’re still in the dehumanized public space of social media, where they’ve been trained to silently focus their eyes forward on a fixed spot; most stare ahead at the backs of other people’s heads almost as if they’re still looking at phone screens. The line is their singular focus. They act as if there’s nowhere else for their gaze to go, nothing else in public they could spend time with instead.
In contrast, the world of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is one refreshingly focused on the expansiveness of the present moment. Like those in the Big Dumb Line, Whyte largely restricts his gaze to the people in front of him, although on their faces and bodies and habits and tics. His gaze is never limited. The passersby are treated by him as important, as important as history, as equally great. The camerawork’s shakiness and lack of polish gives the film a giddy quality. The camera moves like an eye caught by what interests it most, and what interests it most are everyday people. It happily jumps from person to person. It cannot get enough of them.
Unlike Trump, the Decadents, and the line waiters, Whyte seeks no refuge from his present moment or surroundings. He doesn’t turn his gaze indifferently away from public challenges in urban spaces like crime and homelessness. For the former, he proposes unfencing public spaces so they offer less privacy for criminal behavior. For the latter, he promotes tolerance. “Here’s a pigeon lady,” he says, “every square should have one.” Public spaces, he indicates, should be created for a diversity of people and experiences. The film is filled with straightforward strategies to improve these spaces: build ledges at heights people can sit on, add water features people can splash around in. These recommendations, many of which have been implemented throughout the country, are clearly too simple to cause much increased engagement in our socially diminished public, and were too simple for Whyte’s time, too. But the film’s optimistic attitude to people watching is what feels most suited for adoption in the current moment.
William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). Courtesy of Direct Cinema Ltd.
There is a humbleness to the hypotheses that result from Whyte’s observations. He keeps his ideas so quaint and tiny that it seems like anyone could come up with them, and perhaps his intention is indeed to signal we should all try to look outside ourselves for new people-focused theories of our own. The most essential ingredients to formulating a Whytean hypothesis are practicing excited looking and adopting the belief that the present moment is the most important moment. Perhaps this is also a simple hypothesis, but I would like to put forward that the creation of joyful hypotheses through people watching will itself produce richer public spaces.
The magic of Whyte’s documentary comes from its display of how participating in urban spaces can transform into an engagement with one’s larger moment. In a time when we’re asked to sift through the past for greatness and strength, we can sit out in public and look around instead, claim one’s role as an observer, maybe say hello to a stranger, maybe dip a toe in a fountain, and discover it’s all life-affirming, necessary, and fun.
The digitally restored version of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is screening at Anthology Film Archives from September 26 through October 2, 2025.
[1] William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 8th Edition (Project for Public Spaces, 2001), 10.
[2] Zoë Richards and Juhi Doshi, “Trump signs order to send National Guard to Memphis for crime crackdown,” NBC News, September 15, 2025.
[3] James Downie, “Life under Trump’s D.C. takeover is not what you think,” MSNBC, August 31, 2025.
[4] Ron Dicker, “Critics Tell Stephen Miller To 'GTFO' Over His 1 Claim About Trump's DC Takeover,” HuffPost, August 26, 2025. (New York: BuzzFeed, 2025).
[5] Andrea Sachs and Federica Cocco, “D.C. tourism was already struggling. Then the National Guard arrived.”The Washington Post, August 29, 2025.
[6] David Zipper, “What Happened to Hanging Out on the Street?” Bloomberg, January 23, 2025.
[7] Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community,” Office of the Surgeon General, 2023.
[8] Richard Luscombe, “‘A mystical experience’: millions watch total solar eclipse sweep across North America,”The Guardian, April 28, 2024.
[9] Executive Order No. 14344, “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” The White House, August 28, 2025.
[10] Ibid., Sec. 2, 4, 5.
[11] Sylvia Poggioli, “Italy has kept its fascist monuments and buildings. The reasons are complex,” NPR, February 25, 2023.
[12] Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Oxford World’s Classics Edition (Oxford University Press, 2010), 6.
[13] “Big Dumb Line” on Saturday Night Live. Season 50, Episode 15, “Mikey Madison / Morgan Wallen.” Featuring Mikey Madison, Ego Nwodim, Chloe Fineman, Bowen Yang, and Sarah Sherman. Aired March 29, 2025, on NBC.
