ABSTRACT

This chapter reveals how the everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability. Early versions of street furniture are light and flexible: a set of fold-away chairs are laid out in the city's public parks, set out in the morning, tidied away at the end of the day. Street furnishing now extend into the streetscape as permanent fixtures of public space. There are limits though to this practice of formally codifying street furniture. To generate, for instance, a uniform type of public seat is to, by implication, mark out all other spaces that might be used for sitting in as a mis-use of space, e.g. sitting on a set of steps, on a ledge, on a wall. See Resistant Sitting below. Here, the necessarily limited dimension of design coding narrows down and limits the potential for the creative, impromptu (mis)use of urban space.