Places
5 min read
Cities that let you sit down
Count the benches on your street and you learn a lot about who a city is built for.
Mara Solberg
Filed under
Places
Cities, towns and rooms worth walking through.
A city tells you who it is for by where it lets you rest.
In Copenhagen I counted 31 public seats on a single ten-minute walk. In some cities I have counted none, just ledges with studs and bus shelters without a bench.
Seating is cheap and quietly radical. It lets older people run errands, gives parents a place to stop, and turns a pavement into a place to be.
Next time you walk your own street, count. The number is a better measure of a neighbourhood than most rankings.
Written by
Mara Solberg
Mara writes about cities from street level. She has walked every line of the Oslo metro, end to end.
