Compare methods

	Behavioral Mapping	Urban Vitality Index
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1980	1961
Originator	William H. Whyte; Jan Gehl	Jane Jacobs (conceptual); operationalised by later urban analysts
Type	Systematic spatial observation of how people occupy and move through public space	Composite descriptive index of urban vitality
Seminal source	Whyte, W. H. (1980). The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Conservation Foundation. ISBN: 9780891640578	Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House. ISBN: 9780679741954
Aliases	Place-Centered Mapping, Individual-Centered Mapping, Public Life Observation, Spatial Behavior Mapping	Urban Vitality Measure, Jacobs Vitality Index, Street Vitality Index, Urban Liveliness Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Behavioral mapping is the systematic, time-sampled observation of how people actually occupy and move through a public space, recorded directly onto a plan of the site. Developed in the urban context by William H. Whyte's filmed studies of New York plazas and formalized into a public-life methodology by Jan Gehl, it produces an empirical picture of where people sit, stand, walk, and gather, rather than where designers assumed they would. The two core modes — place-centered mapping of who is doing what at fixed moments, and individual-centered tracking of how single people move — together turn the invisible life of a space into mappable data.	The urban vitality index is a composite descriptive measure of how lively, busy and economically active an urban area is, built from the conditions Jane Jacobs argued generate street life. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs identified four generators of diversity — mixed primary uses, short blocks, a mix of building ages, and sufficient density — together producing the foot traffic and 'eyes on the street' that make places vital. The index operationalises these qualities as measurable indicators for each spatial unit, normalises them onto a common scale, and combines them into a single vitality score that can be mapped, compared and tracked over time.