Please Wait to Be Seated
(written on the unceded lands of the Massachusett People)
One of the easiest entry points into the complex palimpsest of public space is through the things we put in it - objects like benches. For this post, I’ll take you on a non-exhaustive tour of the bench-characters in my neighborhood, and we can talk a bit about the types of spaces they create, how inviting or unwelcoming they are, and some of the ways they’re made more complicated by their form and context.
To get a bit theoretical, benches are a useful example of a technology we deploy in public space. A hermeneutic reading of technology suggests that a characteristic of any technology is that it has “multistability” meaning it has the capacity to be taken up for different uses and can be meaningful in different ways. The “dominant” stability is the one most frequently used, and it’s often the purpose for which the device has been designed for. For a bench, the dominant use is as seating, but that’s not the only way we might use one - it might hold our groceries, or help us balance while stretching, or act as a canvas for public art, or even offer a place to lie down. In the abstract, a bench has hundreds of uses - stabilities - beyond sitting, but social forces tend to close many of them off. The strongest example of this is the stigma and criminalization around the use of a bench as a bed, but the material inscription of not-bed-ness into benches across different spaces bleeds into other stabilities.
Let’s start with the saddest benches. The guilty parties are in a small park wedged between a mixed-use building and the railroad tracks. In writing this, I learned that it’s called Alfred Vellucci Park; and is named for a 4-term mayor of Cambridge who apparently had an incredibly antagonistic relationship with Harvard because, as an Italian-American, he was upset when Harvard faculty promoted the claim that Leif Ericcson discovered America instead of Christopher Columbus (just going to reiterate here for a moment that this post is written on the unceded lands of the Massachusett People). He sounds terrible. ANYWAY.
a conspiracy of not-quite-benches
The park primarily consists of the most low-effort attempt at pleasant social space you ever saw. There are three collections of furniture arrayed around a central flower bed in a sort of clover design. Each furniture pod consists of four “benches”, which are really chairs that are bolted to the ground at 90 degree angles to each other. It’s an incredibly difficult park for even the most dominant-use-case users to enjoy because it just isn’t organized around how people gather. If you want to sit alone, you’re left awkwardly facing 3 empty seats, none of which are within reaching distance for say - putting down your belongings or balancing a snack. You and a single companion might be able to sit next to each other, but the seats are awkwardly dimensioned such that as you turn (against that bolted, 90 degree angle) to face each other, your knees knock the arms of the bench. That particular physiological misalignment only continues as you scale up the number of participants in your gathering. Because the layout of the chairs is designed around the (awkward) proportions of the chair/bench hybrids, full occupation of the chairs would have you still leaning forward and negotiating with the arm rests. It’s not even worth investigating if you could sleep here, the whole park was designed to discourage anyone from having a mildly pleasant time in it and it shows.
three long benches off the sidewalk (and a neighbor)
The only time I’ve ever seen people hanging out in AVP is if the benches across the street are otherwise occupied. These three are arranged in a row, opposite some trash cans, a post box, and a street lamp, along the sidewalk of the medium-busy commercial street. They are usually incredibly popular, and the only times I’ve seen them empty or empty-ish are in the early morning, or when someone is using them to sleep (as someone was when I took these photos, whose privacy I’ve done my best to respect/maintain).
The benches themselves are pretty long - six-ish feet would be my guess? And they’re continuously flat - there are no arm rests segmenting them into shorter seating areas. They’re probably around 18 inches deep too, which is all part of what makes them a passable sleeping place in addition to a raucous group gathering space for their regulars.
Interestingly, they’re also not technically public benches. There are some clues about this - they fit perfectly all three in a row in an inset from the low wall that marks the church property’s boundaries. While another post might get into the urban design politics of this low wall, for now it’s enough to say that the benches fall inside the church property line. This means, to a certain extent, they’re subject to the church’s social agenda more so than the dominant social agenda of the greater public sphere they exist just outside of. It’s unclear to me if this means they’re policed less, but based on the use patterns of my neighbors I would guess that that’s the case.
a bench in passing
We can compare them to this long bench outside the (currently under renovation) public housing complex for seniors. The parcel is owned by the LLC that operates as Cambridge Public Housing (ANOTHER interesting tangent on what it means to be public, but let’s stay focused here), and the bench functions as resting space for a bus stop. It’s also mere meters away from the AVP bench clusters, but it certainly sees more use. Part of that has to do with its location, adjacent to the housing complex on one side and a bus stop on the other. When I took this photo, a construction worker was sitting down the bench (it’s very long - 3/5ths of the edge of the property line is bench) taking a cigarette break and a woman was sitting her young child down on it a ways away to wait for the next bus. Despite the length and relatively substantial width of this bench, it is definitely a more public, active, and surveilled space than the trio of benches across the road. The bench serves a specific type of user in the space, one who is just passing through. Spending too much time on it, or laying down even, would call attention to the user. I’m in my second year of living in the orbit of this bench, my fourth of generally observing it in passing, and I’ve never seen someone lie down to sleep here. Doze off sitting up, yes, but nothing more.
I like to think about these three benches as a related collection - they are all located around the same intersection and I think their uses and users have an influence on each other, if one of them were to go away the others would see different use patterns. Their multistability is influenced by social norms (the business of the street, the location of the property line, the property owner) but their physical shape and size and scale and relationship to the transit area of the sidewalk is the major technology dictating their dominant uses. In the next set of benches, this gets a bit more complicated. The three examples I’ll share are all a part of the same school - community center - library block-complex, which is pretty new.
good (?) kitty (?)
The benches themselves are honestly pretty un-hostile. There’s an interesting spatial organization of which types of benches are where, which I have some theories about. For one thing, there’s these public-art cat benches. I don’t want to spend too much time on these, but I will say that they’re awkwardly shaped, definitely meant for single, maybe double occupant use. You can’t lie down on them and they’re all pretty far apart from each other. In descriptions of the project, they’re described as part of the “reading garden” and they have a spatial relationship to the library section of the larger public complex.
The more common benches on the site look like this:
There’s really two types, these long, rectangular, backless ones, and these long, slightly less wide, backed benches. The first are primarily relegated to what I would call the “public” side of the complex - the side of the block that faces out towards the commercial corridor. The second typology mostly appears on the interior of the block, the more “residential” side of the project. They are especially correlated to playgrounds, and places around the complex where adults might have to wait (the one bench that isn’t adjacent to a playground forms a sort of outside waiting area for the administrative offices). The bench selected and designed with a specific dominant user-case in mind, that of a parent watching their child play. They’re long, long enough for multiple parents and multiple children to share, but not very deep. You’re expected to lean back on them but it would be hard for an adult to lie down on them. So despite the relative openness of the design, we can see that there is still some operational exclusion in the design of the bench.
Someone on an online forum was disappointed that the designers couldn’t find a less intrusive way to detail the security cameras because they “ruined the lines” of the building.
The first typology, in contrast, is less prescriptive. It lacks a back, so its orientation is a bit more up for interpretation (though it is organized relative to the buildings and landscape to suggest a front and a back). It’s also wider. You can spread out on it a bit more, and you can absolutely sleep on it. It’s so un-hostile in its design that when the whole thing first opened I struggled to see how they got it through design review. If you look a bit more closely there are some clues.
Namely, the bulging black security camera eyeballs coming off of the roof. The benches themselves can be less securitized in their form because they are coupled with this other technical actor in the network. Outside of the police precinct, which is just a few minutes walk away, this is probably the most intensively recorded location in the neighborhood. By nature of being public property, it is also intensively scrutinized and policed against non-dominant uses. Though policing is always present in public space to a degree, the introduction of surveillance technology replaces the role of a human beat cop in the network. It is far more capable of constant observation than the human mechanics of the police system could ever be. We cannot assume it is impartial by default for being a piece of technology, nor can we assume it is wielded by its operators impartially against the neighbors who use the benches for dominant and non-dominant uses. The city of Cambridge spent $63M on policing in FY2020, more than any other service, 52% of which goes towards patrolling. Somewhere in that budget is the monitoring of these cameras. With a population of around 119,000, the city spends $529 per resident per year on policing (more commentary on this here). An incredibly salient point made by the Black Lives Matter protests in Cambridge this summer is that that patrolling and policing is not equally geographically distributed, and that Black community members are subject to a higher density of overall policing. The Cambridge police don’t have a great record with Black residents and their presumed guilt. The benches are intertwined with the realities of the racist police state.
A soofa charging module between two benches
In addition to the cameras, which are sort of obvious icons of surveillance, there’s another technology at work in the securitization of space here relative to the benches, and it’s one that I admittedly understand less though that makes it no less concerning. The soofa charging docks installed, mostly with a type 1 bench on either side, around the site at first glance offer an opportunity for those using the space to charge their electronics in a sustainable way. This service is massively important to anyone who needs to use their phone outside of their house, but it is especially valuable to the unhoused, who might also be looking for a safe place to sleep. What is less inherently apparent in the presentation of the charger is that it collects cell phone data of wifi enabled devices within 150ft of it. There’s no visible registration of this, nor is there a way to opt out of it if you need to use the outlet (or the bench). And while it may be overly-paranoid to suggest that this data is being used to police citizens right now, there is a very real test of our ethical and moral institutions in expanding non-consensual digital surveillance in a way that seems to support our most vulnerable neighbors while in fact leaving them even more visible to the control room of the city.
While most of the benches toured here perform their dominant stability as places to sit and rest rather well, they are still wrapped up in the larger politics of this place including economic systems, law enforcement, representational schemes, etc. They are not neutral actors, nor do they perform in a vacuum. If we want to dismantle those politics in our public spaces, we need to take the experiences of those who are disadvantaged and otherwise ignored seriously; it is the only way we can expect to make the dominant stability/discussion more objective. It seems like it could be massive enough to start with a bench.
(this post leans heavily on commentary made in Robert Rosenberger’s Callous Objects pamphlet)
