SEATING ACCOMMODATIONS

 Benches and other seating devices are crucial for urban quality of life, for assisting active modes of mobility and reinventing urban space. But traditionally, benches are conceptualised more as design objects than as implements animating urban spatial politics. A limited standard knowledge exists on seating needs and preferences of citizens and cities tend to reinvent the bench and its placement. This project aims to understand decision-making processes for public seating devices, to identify stakeholders, best practices and standard knowledge as well as potential training needs and necessary research. Results will contribute to the development of seating policies integrable in the politics of mobility and urbanism.

 Period : 2022
Project director / coordinator : Renate Albrecher
Other Consortium partners:  City of Munich (Mobilitätsreferat) DE;  Association Bankkultur (CH), IHS – Institut for Advanced Studies in Vienna (AT)
Funding / mandator : EIT Urban Mobility 

Citizen Bench

Citizen Bench: understanding seating-needs for active mobility

The public bench represents a close practical and emotional link between the city and its citizens. It is a key element for active and public modes of transport and the well-being of citizens. This project enables citizens to describe and share their needs of public seating accommodation. The resulting citizen engagement method hogga.me empowers citizens and creates spatial awareness, connects stakeholders and promotes exchange; it allows involvement in the ideation process and promotes emotional ownership and advocacy. The city gets a feedback of citizen’s needs, preferences and restrictions concerning the form, material, placement, orientation of benches and their use. It can adapt its seating-offer to the different existing needs and therefore increase the quality of public space.  Results will serve for the development of an urban seating policy. The pilot project was held in Munich in 2021

 Period : 2021
Project director / coordinator : Renate Albrecher
  Other Consortium partners:  City of Munich (Mobilitätsreferat) DE;  Association Bankkultur (CH), IHS – Institut for Advanced Studies in Vienna (AT), City of MilanoFunding / mandator : EIT Urban Mobility 

Public benches and urban pedestrians

 The public bench is an omnipresent but little-known object in public space. This project aims to test the hypothesis that the bench is an essential ingredient in the attractiveness of walking, for various reasons, linked to the conviviality of public space, the appropriation of time and the need to rest of an increasingly elderly population. It therefore aims to lay the foundations for a seating policy.

The results of more than 8000 pedestrians also show that the social reality of pedestrians has an influence on the spatial and temporal freedom of spontaneous walking. The degrees of freedom in walking are constrained far beyond the limits already imposed by their own bodies: more than half of the pedestrians observed in this study walk very visibly with one and often several constraints.

More women are affected by external/inter-individual constraints with more parallel tasks than men. Three times as many adult women as adult men have a physical commitment beyond walking. Three times as many female pedestrians as male pedestrians accompanied someone on the observed trips.

The case studies took place between 2020 and 2022 in Lancy, Chêne-Bourg, Lausanne, Vernier and Meyrin