The bench - service station for public space users

The bench is an essential ergonomic element to promote walking in everyday life. Even immobility associated with public benches is a key component to promote active mobility. Benches invite to active and passive participation in social life, serve as placemaker but also represent potential physical and social obstacles. Benches are markers of an inhabited city and an explicit invitation to the appropriation of public space. Benches can request and demand particular lines of actions and encourage, discourage, refuse or allow uses - in varying ways for different users and circumstances. The representation of the use of benches differs from spontaneous practices, consisting in a broad variety of uses, of which even users are often not always aware of. The variety of different user groups is characterized by a wide and often contradictory variety of needs, priorities, obstacles and criteria for the use – or non-use - of benches. Identified features concern their positioning and orientation, their equipment and micro-environment, but also their shapes, the material as well as the presence (or absence) of other users and uses of the public realm. The design-process of public seating is value-laden and political, its stakeholders usually belong to a minority of bench-users equipped with highly normative power. Users with « other » needs and preferences are usually not represented in this decision-making processes. The results of our research demonstrate the need for a higher number and more different and user-friendlier types of seating devices in a close-knit network of micro-places in order to serve as a service station to all types of pedestrians (“augmented pedestrian”) and their “multitasking walk” and offer a solution in the form of a low-threshold citizen engagement method (Albrecher et al.2022).