Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation's sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world's population for the first time is now classified as "urban."As metropolitan regions become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable - in short, more "humane".The talk will draw on themes from the 2006 book edited by Dr. Platt: The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City( University of Massachusetts Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy). Dr. Platt's work is in part inspired by and a tribute to the work of Distinguished Professor William "Holly" Whyte, a prominent Urban Sociologist and former faculty member of Hunter College . Whyte's famous observations and film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City made him achampion defender of the value of small public spaces.