Benches will liberate us

Why the people need a place to sit

Here’s a joke: A person walks around an American city and wants to sit down.

That’s not possible, of course, unless you buy something or don’t mind looking homeless. An exception are parks. There are benches in American parks. This is bad.

I spent the holidays back home in the Philadelphia area, and one night after a hundred Yuenglings I walked through Rittenhouse Square. It’s one of the world’s great urban parks. Giving it the White Person’s Stamp of Approval, Jane Jacobs extolled its virtues in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Put a dog on a lawn there and you wouldn’t have to watch it. It’d be confined by benches. They line the pavement everywhere, and they are beefy boys. I didn’t remember it this way, and it made the park feel overstuffed and out of scale, like a kindergarten classroom. If the city did recently install more benches, then I suspect it’s because of increased demand. This is good.

Rittenhouse Square, as captured by a drunk person in the rain.

The problem is that I didn’t see a bench elsewhere in Philly. That’s not unusual. We Americans are obsessed with controlling behavior, which weds us to a rigid and proscriptive form of urban planning. Housing goes here and it must look like this, and businesses go there and it must look like that, and streets are for cars, and if you have a problem with any of this here’s an appeals board composed of seven Jane Jacobs. 

Sitting, too, is to be regulated, when it is allowed. Rittenhouse Square’s benches, while plentiful, are divided by armrests. This is so that the unhoused can’t lay down. This also creates a barrier between strangers and lovers. There’s something thrilling about sharing a public bench. One with an armrest is really two seats, an all together different idea. When we deprive others we deprive ourselves.

Benches in London.

But benches don’t exist outside of parks mostly because they wouldn’t make sense in the spaces we plan for and create in the U.S.

Who wants to sit alongside a six-lane stroad? With high-speed traffic, it’d be too noisy and dangerous. With no pedestrians, it’d be too boring.

It may be nice to sit in a quieter residential area, but sidewalks are often too narrow to accommodate two adults shoulder-to-shoulder, let alone a bench.

And homes in subdivisions don’t have porches or stoops because there’s nothing in the public realm to observe, to be entertained by. There’s no one on the street to do the entertaining.

A bench and a friend in Amsterdam.

Parks, then, are the only sensible and safe places to site benches, which reflects a “monumental” conception of public space—that every land use has it’s defined place and purpose. So what? says every American whose sense of accomplishment and self-worth is tied to how much they last paid for gas. 

So what, I say, if there were “smaller” spaces for people to congregate throughout our communities, so that no one has to travel to exist or socialize in public?

So what if our cities modeled the ideals of the bench?

And so what, God forbid, if there was somewhere to rest our bones for a minute?

The corrective isn’t placing benches in the middle of existing downtown and suburban sidewalks. They would go unused or unkempt. In any event, nearby homeowners would protest their installation. The only things they approve of are their receiving subsidies.

The solution is creating spaces everywhere that accommodate benches. This means retrofitting existing neighborhoods as mixed-use areas where streets are for all users, and this means slowing down cars. But this would necessitate changing how we think about public space in the U.S., and that’s not possible until we change how we think about the public, about others. This means it will likely never happen. 

Maybe that’s for the best. The scene above, which I captured in suburban Paris, is a disaster. The narrow intersection impedes a driver’s ability to get to their destination as fast as possible. The apartments in the background are for poor people and childless losers. And the shrubbery, which buffers the sidewalk from the street and filters stormwater, is ugly lettuce. Why would anyone want to sit there and greet their neighbors?

That was another joke.