Why Are So Many of Our Public Squares Still Empty?

Walk through Place Émilie-Gamelin, Cabot Square, or Viger Square, and you'll notice the common features of poured concrete underfoot, benches bolted in neat rows, maybe a few islands of trees. There will also be almost no one using the space as intended by city planners. These deserted squares are not accidents of geography or decline, but the predictable result of design that prioritizes static aesthetics over vitality—an approach at odds with Montreal's reputation as "the Paris of North America."

Urban designers have understood this for over 40 years. William H. Whyte's Street Life Project (1969-1980), a landmark study of New York’s plazas, found that people almost always move a chair before sitting in it. Mobility, not just seating, invites lingering.

Fixed benches, bolted at a fixed distance and angle, dictate how long to stay and with whom. Jan Gehl's decades of research in Copenhagen reached the same conclusion from another angle: cafés and "active edges" facing a square feed people while the people populate the square in turn, turning empty stone into a place worth passing through slowly.

Bryant Park in New York City is the reference case worldwide, because it ran the experiment for us. Raised above street level and lined with fixed stone, it became, in its own former manager's words, "a drug den and bathroom for the homeless." The 1990s redesign added over a thousand movable chairs and café kiosks, and opened the park’s sightlines to the street. Bryant Park now draws more than six million visitors a year.

Paris made the same bet in 1923 with the city’s Jardin du Luxembourg. The Jardin’s green chairs exist because fixed benches went unused, and its café culture grew out of giving people the freedom of placing their seat in the sun. Vienna's MuseumsQuartier Wien opened with bare stone and no seating until visitors improvised with an artist's foam sculptures. This prompted the museum to install the now-iconic "Enzi" furniture that now anchors five million visits a year, transforming a massive stone open space into an inviting public living room. Italian piazzas would be unimaginable without movable seating and cafés.

This mechanism has a second, harder-edged effect: it changes who parks and squares are used by. Design choices that draw office workers, families, and tourists make a space less viable as a homeless encampment. Gothenburg's Brunnsparken, known throughout the city for its hard stone paving, poor lighting, and lack of active commercial edge, was so uninviting that locals joked "you don't visit Brunnsparken, you walk around it.” Because of its original design, the Brunnsparken became a concentration point for drug dealing and homelessness. Its 2020 redesign which added strip lighting under seating, historic lantern lighting, greenery, and open sight lines is documented to have reduced that concentrated presence. Peer-reviewed research frames this as relocation, not resolution; homelessness doesn't vanish, it moves nearby. But relocation is not nothing. It’s the difference between a square residents avoid, and one they feel safe frequenting or bringing their children to.