Milton Friesen: How Buildings Boss Us Around

Our Social Cities director wrote about how much design matters for The Seekers Journal

Some of Whyte’s insights are that people sit where there are places to sit. If there is no seating in a plaza, there is much less socializing. They calculated it as one sitting place for every 30 square feet of plaza. It was also observed that socially dense areas get denser; we like the comfort of a herd, even if we don’t know the people in it. We also like corners, ledges, double wide benches and moveable chairs, even if we move them in weirdly random ways. We just want to be able to tweak a space before we commit. There are many other insights and significant amounts of other research have run down the path of humans and our relationship to spaces. I just want to say that our buildings are not in total control but they are far from non-factors in our efforts to build human connections and deepen community.