The design and functionality of public spaces in cities are always under scrutiny. Whether its accessibility to public parks and green spaces, the distance people live from public transportation, or the ways that spaces can be designed to make city life more safe and equitable. But now a new issue and one that lives at a smaller scale is starting to arise- where did all of the public seats go?
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Park benches, and other forms of public seating, for such a small element of our daily urban life, play a big part in how we interact with open space. A bench itself invites the art of observation and rest. Users can take a minute to sit down, look around, read a newspaper, eat a sandwich, catch up with a friend, and do a number of other activities. It gives people a simple and almost mindless way to slow down in a high-paced urban area. Lately, many people are asking what happened to the benches that once enabled us to do this. Many of the comfortable seats have been swapped out for metal benches that don’t invite you to linger but instead deter certain types of people, namely the homeless population, promoting a stigma about those who choose to sit. Public seating is a dying species. If and where it does exist, much of it is no longer designed to encourage social behavior.
