Random Seating

One of the things that they teach you in planning school is that seating in public spaces should be moveable. People should be free to drag a chair to the shade or to the sun or up to a table where friends are sitting. This fellow decided the Starbucks patio wasn't to his liking so me moved a chair to this sunnier, grassier location. (I've seen this fellow do this on more than one occaision.)  Does this feel awkward when you see it?  What if there were several other people doing the same thing? 

 

What if the trees were kept, the grass paved, and then many tables, chairs, and umbrellas were placed in the parkway? That seems more appropriately urban for this parkway along busy Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

 

City as Art and Theater

The essential physical means of a city's existence are the fixed site, the durable shelter, the permanent facilities for assembly, interchange, and storage...The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man's more purposive activities are focused, and work out through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups into more significant culminations. 

Lewis Mumford as quoted in Urbanism Without Effort