Compare methods

	Charrette Method	Behavioral Mapping
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2006	1980
Originator	National Charrette Institute (Bill Lennertz & Aarin Lutzenhiser)	William H. Whyte; Jan Gehl
Type	Time-compressed, multi-day collaborative design and planning workshop	Systematic spatial observation of how people occupy and move through public space
Seminal source	Lennertz, B., & Lutzenhiser, A. (2006). The Charrette Handbook: The Essential Guide for Accelerated, Collaborative Community Planning. American Planning Association. ISBN: 9781932364217	Whyte, W. H. (1980). The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Conservation Foundation. ISBN: 9780891640578
Aliases	Design Charrette, NCI Charrette, Dynamic Planning Charrette, Collaborative Design Workshop	Place-Centered Mapping, Individual-Centered Mapping, Public Life Observation, Spatial Behavior Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	A charrette is an intensive, time-compressed collaborative workshop in which designers, planners, officials, and the public work together over several days to produce a feasible plan or design for a place. Codified by the National Charrette Institute in The Charrette Handbook, the method replaces the slow, adversarial sequence of separate meetings with short, repeated feedback loops in which designs are drawn, shown to stakeholders, critiqued, and immediately revised. Its purpose is to compress months of back-and-forth into a few days and to build shared ownership of the outcome.	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.