Blogging Through Sociology of Everday Life (2023)

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a book by William H. White on the design of urban public spaces, based on the observations of the Street Life Project research team he organized in 1970, which observed 16 squares, three small parks and many street corners in New York City. How do you create a humane small urban space? Their observations revealed what kind of spaces people like to sit in, to talk in, to stay in. What kind of spaces are suitable for people to stay. Life in the Square The first part of the study looked at the square. They used observation and interviews to find out who was using the squares, where they came from, where they worked, how often they came here, what their impressions of the squares were and what they did in them. They found that most of the people using the squares were young people working in nearby buildings and that in some of the better-used squares there were more pairs of people. Depending on the season and the climate, the number of people ...

(1) Goffman is an American sociologist and one of the leading figures in symbolic interactionism. He is the author of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, and his main representative sociological ideas include the analysis of dramatic elements and impression management. (2) Goffman's analysis of symbolic interactionism is mainly based on his famous theatre theory. Trained in anthropology and influenced by symbolic interactionism, his focus was on the analysis of 'actor' performances. He argued that the world is a stage and that everyone is an actor, whose activities are performed and constitute the plot of a living drama in some sense. (3) According to Goffman, if an actor wants to play his role well and make a good impression on the audience, he must manage his actions during the performance, otherwise he will not be able to achieve the desired effect. Otherwise the desired effect will not be achieved. He calls this management 'impression management'. *Go...