On the bench. (People & Ideas).

It was fascinating to read Cliff Guy's observations on the planning aspects of cafe society in this journal's June issue, because in the same month I read an item in Planning describing a report from the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit (now known as the Strategy Unit), called Social Capital: A Discussion Paper, which was said to propose measures to encourage `a wider range of spontaneous social connections', recommending `the creation of a street cafe culture in the UK, with the help of street heaters'.

I was curious to know how many kilowatts were ecologically appropriate for my nearest town, and as the report was said to be available from the PIU on 020-7276 1416, I eventually reached John Ambrose, who explained that, regrettably, the document was `not available in hard copy'. However, whenever I visit a town or city, I notice a continuing disappearance of street facilities. I'm not thinking of the street heaters I have never imagined, but of public lavatories, and even of public seats or benches.

Nor is this simply an aspect of the misanthropic British. A bi-lingual book has just appeared in Milan called Panchina/Bench, in which six writers and a dozen photographers and artists consider the use and design of seats in public places. Piero Brunello examines the functions of open-air seats in childhood, youth, adult life, and old age, while the anthropologist Franco La Cecla, who argues that benches are the litmus paper of a country's democracy and tolerance, notes the tendency of big American and European cities to `extinguish' public benches:

`In Paris, as in America, benches are viewed as suspicious places where clochards, hoboes, immigrants, homeless or ill-intentioned people can find refuge. A new anti-clochard bench, which does not allow stable support, was tested in the Paris Metro. Besides not being able to lie on these benches, people cannot even sit on them, as they were designed as an inclined surface. For the shortest possible amount of time a person can sit on them; it is that person's legs that sustain the entire body weight. In Hong Kong, there are precise rules which prohibit people walking in shopping centres from one great skyscraper to another, from sitting down or even resting for only a few short moments. The public bench seems an infraction of one of the rules of the new autocratic cities of the third millennium. The right to enjoy public spaces is reserved solely for the passer-by who (as the French put it) `licks' the shop windows. People are only allowed to rest in those places where they must spend money, whether it is a shop, a theatre, or even inside one's own car, which per se fits the logic of forced circulation.'