VI am absentmindedly, an armrest in the middle of a bench it may seem like a detail, a design choice. Likewise the absence of a backrest, or a curved or narrow seat: aesthetic facts. It’s not like that. Yes, they are choices, but hostile choices: expedients designed to prevent anyone from sleeping on them. Sensational case, which he highlighted a long article by New York Timesis that of the progressive disappearance of typical public benches of the city, long and iconic, made immortal by many films. To replace them, uncomfortable, inclined, inhospitable seats. The main target is the homeless, who could find dignified rest on the classic benches but not on the new ones. But everyone finds themselves orphaned by their session, we are all.
The end of public benches in New York: what is meant by “hostile architecture”
As Setha Low, director of the Public Space Research Group at the City University of New York, interviewed by the newspaper, explains, these choices reveal the change in the way they are perceived squares and shelters. «We only consider these places as places of circulation and movement, and we are making sure that are no longer a place of socialization, meeting and rest». Thus, for example, the inclined bench, installed in a very busy subway station in the West Village, in Manhattan, is not made for sitting, but for “resting the body”.
The bench reinvention processfrom a symbol of shared use of public space to a hostile architectural element, has lasted for decades, and is global. Over the years, designers, developers and city officials they have made it, from London to Milan, increasingly unsuitable for long pauses and deep thoughtsinhospitable for children’s snacks as well as for the idleness of children and the chatter of the elderly.
There are those with the metal arm in the middle which are found in many Italian cities singleslike in Barcelona. Those without sittinguseful only for supporting your back while standing, and the rounded ones or those with an inclined seat. There are various online sites and social networks that register them.
Urban furniture and defensive design
Among the emblematic cases of unpleasant design stands out the Camden Bench, in London, designed in 2012 by the British company UK Company Factory Furniture: a large concrete bench designed in detail to prevent any unwanted use. Like lying down and sitting comfortably, or hiding objects (from drugs to waste). But there are also defensive furnishings studs or spikes at thresholds, shop windows, porches. And also automatic water sprinklers and disturbing lights, which discourage prolonged parking in many large cities.
The benches of Manhattan and the new mayor of New York
Certainly the New York case is particularly significant for the care with which they were designed and arranged in Manhattan. For example, those mass-produced for Central Park, in cast iron, with flared and thin legs. Or the Chrystie-Forsythe model, bulkier and with a concrete base (neither had armrests).
The golden age of the bench suffered a first setback already after the Great Depression when the urban planner Robert Moses introduced the benches with metal dividers (“hooped dividers”) to prevent “drunks” from sleeping in the parks. Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (90s) the approach became explicitly repressive, with the ban on sleeping on the streets.
As Setha Low says again at New York Times, the problem is obviously not the benches, but the fact that there are homeless people who sleep on those benches. Because of this, in the aftermath of the election of Zohran Mamdani, attention to public space could become of public (and political) interest again. And if Mamdani didn’t talk about benches, in his electoral speeches, he instead talked a lot about the right to housing.