For many of us, public parks and urban spaces took on a whole new significance during the pandemic – offering a rare opportunity to experience a sense of community in real life. The effect was to cast a spotlight on the street furniture that helps transform urban spaces into civilised outdoor living rooms for all.

Why street furniture matters

In a line-up that includes lamps and litter bins, bicycle racks and bus stops, pissoirs and play equipment, the urban bench takes a starring role. By providing somewhere to sit and watch the world go by the bench is key to placemaking, transforming a route from A to B into somewhere – a place to pause and connect, to see and be seen. And like all street furniture, the bench needs to balance durability and usability with inclusivity and aesthetics while embedding a sense of civic identity.

A place to sit has been integral to urban planning from the agorae of the Ancient Greeks onwards (think of the stone seating integrated into piazzas, loggias and facades in a Renaissance city like Florence). But it was in the industrial era that the park bench really came into its own, as cities expanded and new manufacturing techniques allowed mass production in cast iron.

Urban identity

A city’s bench designs are integral to its personality, as illustrated by New York’s ‘Central Park Settees’. Although the very first benches in Central Park, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 1850s, were rustic timber structures conveying a pastoral idyll, these were soon superseded by more urbane and practical seating for the crowds that flocked to the Park in the 1870s. Defined by their own distinctive hue – now known as ‘Central Park Green’ – many of these historic ‘settees’ consist of timber slats spanning between pairs of cast-iron brackets that could be manufactured at scale, and today an army of volunteers regularly repaints the park’s 10,000 benches.

In Paris it was Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal for Napoleon III in the 1850s that embedded the bench in the city’s character. Early examples of the city’s iconic green public benches were designed by architect Gabriel Davioud to populate Haussmann’s grands boulevards and public gardens. Some sources say that today there are as many as 100,000 public benches in Paris, including historic examples of the ‘gondole’ with its curved profile and multiple slats, the Buttes-Chaumont model with iron supports modelled on tree branches, and the dual-facing banc-double seen mostly on boulevards. What continues to unite these diverse models of Paris bench is their characteristic colour – Carriage Green. In contrast, London’s archetypal park bench remains, for the moment, a single-aspect hardwood version with a natural finish, although an annual competition from the London Festival of Architecture regularly challenges the status quo with exciting and often colourful prototypes in materials as diverse as recycled plastic and cork.

Benches of the people

Citizens love their benches and in turn urban furniture needs to be durable enough to withstand constant challenges in all weathers. While research shows that simply sitting outdoors in nature for half an hour can significantly reduce stress, in reality benches are used for multiple purposes including ‘park bench workouts’, for skateboard tricks or even as a place to sleep. So bench design needs to navigate the often controversial territory between regulating the use of public realm and offering a comfortable place where everyone is welcome to sit and enjoy shared space. Increasingly, in cities like London and Paris, designers are engaging in co-design and public consultation to find enduring solutions for urban furniture that will hopefully be loved by generations of people to come.