All at once, four actors dressed in jean jackets and black track pants jump onto a park bench set up in the middle of the Petit Colombes town square. Lifting their arms overhead, they form an “X” with their wrists and call out to the crowd: “Defend our benches!”
One by one, the actors impersonate a young teen waiting for his crush, an older mother, a homeless man, and a child. Despite their differences, they all have one thing in common: an appreciation – no, a need – for their local park bench.
“A park bench is … a place of shared experience,” says one actor from the Annibal et ses Éléphants theater troupe.
Why We Wrote This
Officials in suburban Paris have removed benches to promote safety, altering public spaces in the process. Efforts to restore that seating aim to highlight how community and understanding are built.
“On this bench, we slow down,” says another. “We’re together, even when we don’t get along.”
At the annual International Park Bench Festival in the neighborhood of Petit Colombes, one of suburban Paris’s poorest, the public bench is the star. For months, area schools have been building benches out of discarded wooden pallets and rehearsing theater productions that put a focus on the importance of taking back public spaces.
But for a city celebrating park benches, Colombes has surprisingly few. Twenty years ago, it – like many French cities – pulled out most of its public benches as a way to dissuade delinquency, when the death of two teens after a police chase led to violent urban riots across the country.
Now, two decades later, French cities continue to struggle with how to organize public spaces and create community, while discouraging loitering. Park benches have been at the heart of heated debate between citizens and local lawmakers, who disagree on the benefits and caveats of gathering in public spaces, and on who has the right to do so.
“Public space, by nature, should be a place that is accessible and welcoming to everyone,” says Stéphane Malek, co-founder and director of Monono, a Paris-based urban design agency. “But this concept is increasingly threatened. There is less and less tolerance for certain people to hang around. Cities want people to move along and not stagnate. But the challenge is, we also have to create places to sit down.”
Sitting vs. sojourning
“Sitting in public is at once a banal and delicate behavior,” wrote French sociologist Michèle Jolé in 2003.
It was banal, he said, because sitting in public was something people did often. Delicate, because doing so exposes one to observation: what you are wearing or reading, your quirks and gestures on display.
Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto/Reuters
Public benches have existed in French cities since its cities were born. In the 19th century, Georges Eugène Haussmann famously transformed Paris, creating wide boulevards, gardens, and squares, punctuated with perfectly aligned trees and, of course, park benches.
Haussmann worked closely with French architect Gabriel Davioud, who designed the iconic forest green benches that have become a beloved fixture of the Parisian landscape. So beloved, that when one came up at auction in 2019, it sold for 2,000 euros ($2,325 today).
But over the years, public benches – and the people they attract – have created clashes in French communities.
In 2015, the southern city of Perpignan removed its park benches to stop the homeless population from squatting. In 2021, locals in the Paris suburb of Montrouge petitioned to install more public benches. But others complained that they invited noise and undesirable behavior, like drinking and littering.
Cities like Paris have since experimented with curved seats, upright chairs with no arm rests, or uncomfortable benches that discourage sleeping. Others continue to remove seating. But experts in urban planning say that’s not the answer, and that public spaces should create a balanced ratio of “staying” and “sojourning” – meaning people who stop to sit, and those who continue onwards.
“If you have no public benches, it sterilizes the streets and creates more of a feeling of unsafety,” says Sonia Lavadinho, an urban anthropologist and director of the Geneva-based Bfluid urban planning agency. “Public spaces need biodiversity and people of different backgrounds, and to create reasons why people are there. The more places feel secure, the more devious activities are avoided.”
Designs that beckon and unite
So what makes the perfect bench? That is one of the biggest challenges for urban designers.
“A good bench is one that allows you to be alone if you prefer, or if you want to be with people, it should allow for that,” says Ms. Lavadinho. “The more you can give people the choice of how they use their bench, as part of an ecosystem, the better.”
Moveable benches, like the green chairs at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, have had great success, according to studies, because they give people control over their space.
The circular bench by Belgian designer Lucile Soufflet – often wrapped around trees or poles – allows people to be together or look straight ahead, alone. Similarly, Antoni Gaudí’s snaking mosaic bench in Barcelona gives intimate spaces, while also providing moments of togetherness.
But it’s not just the type of bench that beckons consideration. Having benches every few hundred meters offers people, such as older adults and small children, a place to rest. But too many benches in dark corners can encourage loitering and drug-related activity. There is still discomfort in most communities regarding the homeless population, for whom “public space is vital,” says Mr. Malek, the urban planner.
Providing welcoming spaces that are not exclusive to certain populations, that encourage movement and life, help create economic vitality. They can also help remove prejudices and help communities come together.
That is ultimately the goal of the International Park Bench Festival. This year, as with previous iterations, the Cave à Théâtre production company, the festival organizers, have brought in their own benches for the show. The neighborhood’s main square only has a few upright chairs near a bus stop on the corner. Despite the city’s attempts to install more benches, they keep getting damaged and soiled.
Most locals have found their own ways to occupy their space. Around the edges of the square, men and women sit on a line of concrete ledges that hold up the foundation at the entryway of a towering housing estate, watching the festival from behind the stage.
“This is where people who live in this neighborhood usually sit, to talk with friends or get a coffee,” says Mamadou Samb, his legs swinging off one of the ledges as he sits inches from his friend, Adriano Correia. “It doesn’t bother us to sit here.”
But a few minutes later, as the actors pack up their gear, a local man in a beige suit and sunglasses sits down on one of the benches left over from the show. He crosses one leg over the other, looks out, and soaks up the sun.
