Seats for “living together” in the city
Des sièges pour “vivre ensemble” en ville
Sehirde birlikte yasam için koltuklar
Résumé
The French word urbanité does not only define the character of the city as opposed to rurality, but a courtesy, a politeness, a sociability. In order to understand this value, which is considered a property of the city, the observation can take place on the scale of urban planning, architecture or even urban furniture. This article focuses on the micro scale of urban design, and in particular on seats, to observe their form and distribution in public space. It draws its first elements from an ethnographic walk in Bordeaux and then characterizes these seats in public space that determine interactions between
“individuals with” (Goffman, 1973) before proposing several criteria of this “living together”. The discussion is based on central concepts for semiotics and design: the framework of practices (Fontanille, 2008), factitivity (Greimas, 1983), affordances (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1988; Deni, 2005) and adjustment (Landowski, 2006) considered as a general framework.