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The Trash Bin on Stage: on the Sociomaterial Roles of Street Furniture

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The Trash Bin on Stage: on the Sociomaterial Roles of Street Furniture Urban Planning (ISSN: 2183–7635) 2020, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 121–131 DOI: 10.17645/up.v5i4.3310 Article The Trash Bin on Stage: On the Sociomaterial Roles of Street Furniture Johan Wirdelöv Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 23053 Alnarp, Sweden; E-Mail: [email protected] Submitted: 31 May 2020 | Accepted: 29 July 2020 | Published: 12 November 2020 Abstract They are easily overlooked, but benches, trash bins, drinking fountains, bike stands, ashtray bins, and bollards do influ- ence our ways of living. Street furniture can encourage or hold back behaviours, support different codes of conduct, or express the values of a society. This study is developed from the observation that the number of different roles taken on by street furniture seem to quickly increase in ways not attended to. We see new arrivals such as recycled, anti-homeless, skateboard-friendly, solar-powered, storytelling, phone-charging and event-making furniture entering public places. What are typical sociomaterial roles that these things play in urban culture of today? How do these roles matter? This article suggests a conceptualisation of three furniture roles: Carnivalesque street furniture takes part in events and temporary places. Behaviourist street furniture engages in how humans act in public. Cabinet-like street furniture makes itself heard through relocating shapes of other objects. These categories lead to two directions for further research; one concerning the institutions behind street furniture, and one concerning how street furniture shapes cities through influencing differ- ent kinds of ‘scapes.’ The aim of this article is to advance theory on an urban material culture that is evolving faster and faster. By conceptualising this deceptively innocent group of things and articulating its relations to the everyday structures of the city, I hope to provide a framework for further studies. Keywords everyday life; material culture; public space; sociomaterial densification; street furniture Issue This article is part of the issue “Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life” edited by Mattias Kärrholm (Lund University, Sweden) and Sandra Kopljar (Lund University, Sweden). © 2020 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction they take part in structuring everyday urban life? They are easily overlooked, but benches, trash bins, drinking At the ruins of Pompeii, there is a table-like piece of fur- fountains, bike stands, ashtray bins, and bollards do in- niture with inscriptions and bowl-shaped holes in differ- fluence our ways of living. They can encourage or hold ent sizes in its surface. The mensa ponderaria was used back behaviours, support different codes of conduct, or as a public measuring table, and the holes worked as express the values of a society. The trash bin keeps you standardised units for trading goods. It can be imagined from throwing things on the ground; the traffic sign tells how this object played a particular role in structuring the you how to behave; the length of the bench seat forces daily life of the ancient market place: It probably changed you to decide on how close to sit to an unknown per- how people negotiated prices and maybe helped avoid son. In short, street furniture allows and disallows. The conflicts and made trading more efficient. The combina- subtle but many ways in which these objects perform tion of a technical dimension and a social dimension here makes them powerful actors in the social game of city life, makes the mensa ponderaria a striking case of when a and without them the masks of civility we wear in public thing takes on a role best described as ‘sociomaterial.’ (Sennett, 1977) would probably look a bit different. Today, other kinds of furniture have entered squares and This study is developed from the observation that streets. What sociomaterial roles do they play? How do the number of different roles taken on by street furni- Urban Planning, 2020, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 121–131 121 ture seems to quickly increase in ways not attended to. ising this overlooked group of things and testing how its Furniture is simply doing more and more in public places. relations to urban culture can be articulated, I hope to While the milestone, the whipping post, the horse water provide a rough blueprint for continued studies. trough, and the scrapers for cleaning one’s shoes from dirty streets have retired (cf. Warren, 1978), we now see 1.1. Approaching Street Furniture a range of new and evolving kinds. There is furniture that is produced from recycled materials, that is delib- The word ‘furniture’ stems from the French word fournir, erately uncomfortable and targets the homeless, that meaning to supply or provide, while in many European is 3D printed, that charges your phone, that is friendly languages the word for furniture is related to mov- to skateboarders, that is heated by solar panels, and ing or being mobile, from the Latin mobilia (German: that sends a signal when maintenance is needed. There möbel; French: meubles). The term is sometimes un- is street furniture partaking in explorative artistic and clear: Do technical objects such as power boxes belong? collaborative interventions (cf. the Berlin-based, inter- Bus shelters, public urinals, and kiosks can border be- disciplinary project “Hacking Urban Furniture”). There tween ‘building’ and ‘furniture’—where to draw the line? are anti-terror installations camouflaged as artwork, bike Categories such as artworks and monuments further add stands, or even in the shape of decoratively cute animals to the fuzzy borders. To convey the richness of this sub- (Coaffee, 2018). There are retired phone booths turned ject, I have kept to a loose and inclusive view on what into Wi-Fi hotspots and mini libraries. Street furniture street furniture can be. appears to become increasingly intricate; it mutates, hy- As noted in Song’s (2011, p. 16) review of defini- bridises, and acts in multiple ways. It seems to densify tions, history, and design principles of street furniture, re- and diversify at the same time. How can this changing search on the subject is fragmented. When approaching landscape of things be made sense of? this field, I have used systematic and intuitive methods While street furniture is acknowledged as an impor- in combination to gather empirical material. In October tant place-making tool in urban design (cf. Gehl, 2011), 2019, I searched in Scopus and Web of Science Core this rich group of objects has mostly escaped questions Collection for works containing the phrase ‘street furni- about its societal and cultural impact. Against the back- ture’ (or alternative phrases such as ‘urban’ or ‘public ground of urban areas becoming more complex, we furniture’) in title or abstract. Duplicates removed, the re- need to understand cities also from the deceptively in- sults amounted to about 500 (of which some 25% were nocent viewpoint of street furniture. A hypothesis here conference proceedings). Some of the most apparent is that street furniture can be understood as actors areas associated with street furniture span from urban in processes of sociomaterial densification (Østerberg, planning, urban design, and architecture to transporta- 2000). The term densification is in this case broadened tion, ergonomics, engineering, product design, and art. to describe more than planning strategies; cities can I limited the results to works including the search be thought of as more or less dense with regards to phrases in its title and screened the one hundred ab- strangers, lifestyles, narratives, everyday practices, and stracts left in order to better approximate themes char- so on (see also Harvey, 1989, on time-space compres- acteristic of current research into street furniture. Some sion). From this perspective, the hyper-diverse ‘land of often overlapping themes found in this variegated body strangers’ (Amin, 2013) that now characterises many of works include street furniture related to ecologi- public places is a form of densification. One way to put it cal sustainability (cf. Jaramillo, Gallardo, & Martinez, is that this land of strangers is paralleled by a densifying 2018; Siu & Wan, 2011), digitalisation and smartness ‘land of strange things’—including street furniture. (cf. Ciaramella et al., 2018; Lamsfus, Cazorla, & Sanjuan, As frameworks of how furniture can support desir- 2014), place identity (cf. Bayraktar, Tekel, & Ercoşkun, able place-making are provided elsewhere (cf. Main & 2008; Bolkaner, Inancoglu, & Asilsoy, 2019), design Hannah, 2010), this study shifts focus toward street fur- method (Prazeres et al., 2019; Şahin & Curaoğlu, 2019; niture as a cultural artefact. What are typical sociomate- Schindler & Mbiti, 2011) and to questions of human be- rial roles that these things play in urban culture of today? haviour and perception (cf. de Paiva, 2017; Pizzato & And how do these roles matter? In the following, I will Guimarães, 2019). suggest three sociomaterial roles named carnivalesque, The mapping of these themes outlined an area behaviourist and cabinet-like street furniture, and I will of things that is undergoing a rapid development— demonstrate how shifts between furniture roles occur. technically, ecologically, and in terms of design—but that I end by pointing out two directions for further research; also lacks conceptualisations from
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