Hello discoverers!

The architects of our apartment development did something rare during planning: they convinced the council to close off the last section of the street, replacing it with greenery and seating. As a result, there are now concrete blocks to sit on, stepped-back shop fronts whose edges double as places to perch, and a handful of wooden picnic benches added later by us residents.

On a sunny weekend, the street feels alive. People linger over coffee, kids jump the rocks in the garden, neighbours running errands end up in conversation. (Here’s a short video of our street from a couple of years ago.)

That experience makes me feel the loss described in Gabrielle Bruney’s eloquent and damning essay on the disappearance of the public bench. Somehow the humble bench – low-cost, low-tech, uncommonly democratic – has become one of the most contested objects in urban design.

Bruney’s case in point is New York’s beautiful Moynihan Train Hall, where travellers sprawl on the floor and families use their luggage as furniture – not because it’s overcrowded, but because the benches are largely gone, removed by design to discourage homeless people from lingering.

“Unlike parks or homeless shelters, [benches are] small and relatively inexpensive interventions, six-foot-long microcosms of a far broader debate over whom our cities should be structured to serve and how best to do so. To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.”

I loved her observation about what we lose beyond the physical convenience of somewhere to rest. Sitting on a public bench means surrendering some control. The friction is the point:

“In interacting with civic infrastructure, we surrender a degree of control. If the book I want has been checked out, or the seat I sought is occupied, there’s not much to do but wait my turn. These collective goods offer a refresher course in a skill rarely taught after kindergarten: sharing. Public goods help us learn, as Honig writes, that ‘we are not always in charge’.”

Sadly, today the image of a park bench has become almost synonymous with homelessness – a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be shared. Bruney reminds us that benches are one of the last things in public life that don’t require a ticket or a purchase:

“Like the subway and public library, benches are places that people who have nowhere to go, go. Observers of the public realm have long pointed out that depriving people in distress of a place to sit down is gratuitous cruelty. … In occupying a public bench, the most marginalized members of society make a claim to visibility, which is also a claim to personhood. And not everyone finds them deserving.”

This hostility has been institutionalised through the rise of privately owned public spaces – plazas and atria that look public but are managed by developers with a commercial interest in who lingers and who doesn’t.

The same logic – public spaces that are increasingly hostile to anyone who isn’t actively consuming – applies just as well to the internet. Spencer Chang makes this connection in a companion essay:

“[The Internet] has been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.”

Homelessness is a layered crisis and, no, more benches won’t solve it. But designing public spaces that offer nowhere to rest doesn’t move us closer to a solution – it just makes the failure less visible. I’m aware of how privileged I am to live on a street designed with this kind of generosity, but privilege shouldn’t be a prerequisite for somewhere to sit.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai