Venice, the Floating City

Venice is most famously known as the Floating City or the City of Canals. The vaporetti, the public water buses, and the motoscafi, the private water taxis, shuttle people around the city’s extensive network of canals. There simply were and are no cars anywhere to be found. As a consequence, the city is connected by wonderful, picturesque pedestrian walkways. The connections between land and water are handled via bridges and specific vaporetto stops.The Network of the City Streets

I do not think I will ever be able to completely navigate Venice without the map on my phone, no matter how often I visit. The city is a labyrinth, with almost no visible landmarks on which to orient oneself when looking up. As we walk through the streets, there is no hierarchy to the width, length, or directional orientation to help one navigate. With the many different islets (118 actually) physically separated by canals, one is constantly on a bridge or a cul-de-sac. Only a few continuous routes connect the Grand Canal to different districts.

On the other hand, one is usually pleasantly surprised when turning a corner to find an interesting shop. Or, to find a restaurant whose tables and crowds spill outside only when the sun has set. These are the hidden local social spaces in the respective neighborhoods. One even finds small altars to some saint in a wall alcove, or perhaps some artist’s work (a Banksy or a robot). The lack of alternative cross-district routes from different points means that everyone — commuters, residents, and tourists — is forced through the same paths. This is generally a good thing: when one is lost, it’s easy to just follow the flow of the crowd. Especially so on a sunny weekend in spring or fall, which brings an average of 70,000 day-trippers.

The Ancient Venetians Knew the Value of Urban Planning

By its nature, without cars, the city has natural superblocks. The term superblocks represents the historical and contemporary tension in urban planning. The most successful modern superblock initiatives — most notably Barcelona’s Superblocks (”superilles”) launched in 2016 — actively work to reverse modernist isolation by reclaiming existing urban grids. They consolidate smaller blocks or districts in a city, giving the interior streets back to the community. Traffic is taken away from these areas. These calm environments allow for spontaneous “micro-interactions” — such as neighbors chatting or greeting local shopkeepers.

The interior streets connect and create squares, campi, that are outdoor living spaces for the community. Many of them were designed with wells. Some have water fountains or water pumps that tourists flock to in summer. They typically also offer a bit of shade from the buildings or some trees, and a place to rest with some benches. For the locals, the campi are the dedicated space for children to play, teenagers to gather, and older adults to sit and converse comfortably on benches. As one enters from a calle, the light flapping of the washing lines welcomes people in greeting. Sometimes we found notices posted up with births and deaths of community members.

Some older cities have such natural boundaries, like water or mountains, to keep out intrusive city planning. It makes it easier to build and maintain such community-first living. What is your favorite old city?

This summer, we visited two cities that are familiar but somehow every time we visit they show us something new about them — Paris and Venice. Therefore, I am going to share this post in two parts, one on each city.

Paris, La Ville Lumière

Paris, the City of Light, La Ville Lumière, always shines brightly for me. It was one of the first European cities I visited as a teenager. It carries the name for two reasons: first, for being one of the first European cities to adopt gas street lighting in the nineteenth century, and second, for being known as a global hub for science, philosophy, and education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

La Résistance for the “Right to the City”

What I appreciate about Parisians is their commitment to resistance. When I was studying engineering, we were taught urban planning based on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City model applied in Paris. It prioritized high-speed traffic for cars, dense parking in cities, and drawing people into suburban sprawl. It was the model used across most U.S. cities. The May 1968 student and worker revolts, however, pushed back hard against this kind of modernist, car-first planning. This led to a “right to the city” collective civil resistance, an anti-car movement.

That spirit of resistance continued in Paris, and under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Ville du Quart d’Heure became the basis for an ambitious planning model. The goal is to ensure that every resident’s essential daily needs — work, grocery shopping, education, healthcare, and recreation — are accessible within a short 15-minute walk or bike ride from their home.

Egalitarian Biking as It Should Be

Since Hidalgo came into office in 2014, the city has transformed. Many may be aware of the Plan Vélo, the 1,000 kilometers of protected bike paths, in which the city heavily invested. The city also removed 60,000 car parking spaces. These two changes served as a major catalyst for micro-mobility — the shared bikes and scooters. What is great is that 40% of the fleet are e-bikes. In the peak summer months, Vélib’s own numbers show that each public bike is used more than 10 times a day on average — a stat I was happy to confirm rather than take on faith. What I was also happy to see was that new Vélib’ subscribers reached nearly 49% women in the months after lockdown, up from 40% before the pandemic — protected bike lanes clearly playing a role in making it a more egalitarian mode of transport.

Reuse of Industrial Architecture for Park Benches

Another resistance initiative that we visited this time was the Promenade Plantée. This is a pedestrian-first adaptive reuse project started in the late 1980s for the Vincennes railway line. It became the world’s first elevated linear park when it was inaugurated in 1993, inspiring the later New York City High Line. It is a beautiful 4.7-kilometer-long viaduct with a lush green walkway. It has lots of park benches with many people enjoying their lunch or a coffee. The brick arches below it have been renovated into the Viaduc des Arts, filled with really interesting local craft boutiques and workshops.

Lastly, we enjoyed how these measures also allowed the typical Parisian cafe culture to extend beyond the sidewalks, where traffic was closed off to cars. In these little parks where the streets intersect, the atmosphere was lively in the evenings with restaurants extending their tables and the overflow of people sitting on park benches. One day, we even saw a roller-skater group racing down the streets of Montmartre. Talk about reclaiming the right to the city!

What was your favorite summer discovery?

My son and I went to Paris and had a chance to go through the Louvre. We came across Thomas Gainsborough’s Conversation in a Park, from the 1700s. The painting depicts a couple on a park bench, believed to be a self-portrait of Gainsborough and his new wife, Margaret, painted the year they married — an idealized vision of the society he hoped to join.

The space between them is a modest distance, though there are no others in the picture. They sit in the shade of a tree with lush foliage around them as if they are taking a break from a walk. The gentleman is speaking animatedly, and the woman is sitting near him listening attentively. They clearly seem to be enjoying the “third space” the park bench offers: intimacy for a conversation without breaking the social conventions of the time about where and how such moments were acceptable between the sexes.

After we left the exhibit, my mind kept coming back to that painting and who used park benches long ago. They started as a symbol of status and social hierarchy, much like parks themselves, not carrying the egalitarian view we have of them now.

In Ancient Times, Seating Was a Privilege

For instance, starting in Ancient Egypt, drawings and sculptures often show that those who sat in chairs and stools were rulers and other figures of status — though it wasn’t absolute; the Louvre’s own famous *Seated Scribe* is a reminder that seating occasionally extended beyond royalty. In paintings and frescoes from classical Greece and Rome, we see public seating, or stone benches, used to engage citizens in public discourse with speakers or performers. This is when the bench appears to become more open to the general public, and not always located in a park. It created a place for conversation and an exchange of ideas.

The Aristocracy Claims the Space

Looking into later paintings from the early 1900s, I came across Game of Tennis by Spencer Frederick Gore. What I especially liked about this one was that it features two women, one playing tennis and the other watching while seated on the bench. Gore’s father, Spencer Gore, won the first-ever Wimbledon Championship in 1877, so the setting is more likely near their home outside London or even on their property. The style and form are like the French painters of the time who captured the aristocrats at play in these outdoor settings.

Accessibility to Nature Is Everyone’s Right

Then, as we move into the 20th century, two paintings really caught my eye: Old People on a Park Bench by David Stefan Przepiora and The Park Bench by Horace Pippin. The contrast is what interested me: a place for gathering people, and a place for solitary reflection. In Przepiora’s painting, the older people are ordinary people, not high society. They are engaged in watching society, keeping an eye on the movements of those who pass by as they reflect. In Pippin’s, the lone person appears deep in thought, nothing much going on around them. While their paintings are different in style and social representation, they both depict, to me, the bench as a place of refuge or rest, a place to pause.

More recently, I came across a project from a UK artist, Lizzie King “You Belong Here,” commissioned for the Rediscovering Salford exhibition in 2021. She created a series of photographic prints and postcards from benches in Peel Park, one of the first public parks in the country. It was created in 1846 through public fundraising and was free to use. It was a much-needed way to improve the overall wellbeing of residents in Victorian times who often lived in cramped accommodations. It brought all Salford residents together then and now, with the addition of the free Salford Museum & Art Gallery, which sits right in Peel Park and where you can see the Old People on a Park Bench by Przepiora.

What art inspires you to think about society and culture?

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The “Tourist vs. Local” Paradox: Real Life Is Just Not that Glamorous

Typically, as a tourist, one prioritizes sight-seeing, cultural or sporting activities, and the food and entertainment scene. Therefore, big cities tend to dominate as top destinations — London, Cape Town, New York, Singapore, and Seoul. For livability though, a city with more stable macro-level factors like political stability, societal security, and infrastructure are more highly weighted. All the reports indicate that this year especially, political instability has played a far greater role in shifting both the top tourist destinations as well as the livability index.

Interestingly, the top two most livable cities in this year’s EIU Global Livability Index — Copenhagen and Vienna — operate on a scale that allows for easier management of public resources and environmental health. Tokyo is the exception, the only city to rank in the top 10 for both livability and global tourist appeal. Somehow the megacity manages to be a perpetual pop-culture craze generator, to contain a patchwork of many subcultures, and to still be one of the safest and most walkable places.

Image from https://ouchikustudio.com/products/tokyo-japan-retro-skyline

Is Livability in the Eye of the Beholder?

Vancouver, Canada, is the only North American city represented. Interestingly, no U.S. cities made the top ten of the EIU report at all, which sent me looking at another ranking, this time of U.S. cities by U.S. News & World Report. What the indices share in common is a baseline of livability built on education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Where the U.S. ranking diverges is its heavier emphasis on personal economics, like job market strength and cost of living, as the definition of “good value.” This also led to a higher ranking of cities with populations in the 100-200,000 range.

In my own experience, that is certainly true. Growing up in a small town, my brother and I always knew that we would move and live away from where we grew up. Many of our friends were the same. We both studied and worked in several different cities before having children. In general, changing jobs and moving towns is more common in the U.S than in Europe. Perhaps the difference in perspective comes from being a large, fairly homogenous country.

Historical Roots Should Not Stunt Modern Growth

Copenhagen and Vienna are also cities with deep historical roots that massively boost their scores in culture and environment. However, their ancient city layouts often make retrofitting for 21st-century environmental standards a complex engineering challenge. What is incredible, nonetheless, is that across 862 European cities surveyed by Bertasello et al, nearly 90% of the population resides within 1 km of a park (and park benches!). Their planning guideline, known as the 3-30-300 rule, advocates for three trees visible from every home, 30% neighborhood canopy cover, and a park within 300 meters. To achieve this, we see cities are getting creative. One popular measure in London, Hamburg, Paris is converting areas in car-free zones and converting paved areas back to green space.

Intentionally and strategically integrating green spaces and parks within city planning continues to make cities livable overall. I was pleased to see that several Asian cities now rank in the global top 20. It clearly shows that significant public investment and focus on improving infrastructure and healthcare are paying off. In Singapore, for example, developers are mandated to replace greenery lost to construction by building vertical sky gardens and rooftop forests. In cities like Seoul and Penang, public parks are increasingly designed to double as flood and stormwater management, capturing excess rain intentionally.

For Those With Wanderlust and Fernweh

Livability does not come down to a single number but a balance of stability, modernization, historical charm, and nature. Ultimately, it is a community that successfully prioritizes wellbeing, greenery, and social connection. In a world of volatility, the most valuable urban asset is a city that feels like home.

The “perfect city” exists when you choose the lens through which you view the world. Which lens do you choose?

I recently watched ‘Voicemails for Isabelle,’ a bittersweet romcom in which a bench with a view over the iconic San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge was a recurring, dominant setting. It got me thinking about different movies and streaming series in which the simple park bench is a deceptively powerful prop. Not only is it a convenient place for characters to sit down outside without any preparation, but it also serves as the frame for an intimate dialogue between characters.

The Masterful Mechanics of the Park Bench

The Side-by-Side Psychological Shift

It is well known that humans find it easier to have vulnerable, difficult, or intense conversations when sitting side-by-side rather than face-to-face. Sometimes sitting opposite someone face-to-face can feel confrontational or interrogative. Sitting on a park bench forces two characters to look at the same view. This aligns their physical perspective, allowing them to drop their guard, speak directly from the heart, and manage the space between them. People only look at each other when the line, or the sentiment, truly demands impact.

Public Space, Private Bubble

The other mechanic is the one I am constantly reiterating: it is the paradox of the park bench existing in a highly public, communal space, yet it inherently creates an invisible “private bubble.” I am only now realizing that this juxtaposition is cinema gold. It offers the space for clandestine meetings — a massive trope in spy and thriller movies — where characters blend into the background as “street furniture” to exchange secrets while maintaining situational awareness. It is a natural point for one to briefly stop in plain sight.

A Natural Frame for Directors

I also learned that cinematographers absolutely love benches because they easily accommodate both frontal and lateral two-shot framing. A bench establishes a fixed spatial relationship between two characters. The camera tracks the exact physical distance between them to illustrate emotional distance. If characters start on opposite ends of the bench and gradually move closer, the audience instantly registers a bridge in their emotional gap.

Core Cinema Trends & Tropes

As I am learning about the different ways park benches are used, I found four interesting tropes.

The “Life Ledger” or Reflection Pause

Here the bench represents a literal pause in a character’s journey. Characters sit down when they are exhausted, stuck, or need to process a major life shift. One of the most memorable examples of this is in the monologue delivered by Sean (Robin Williams) to Will (Matt Damon) in Good Will Hunting (1997). In the bench scene in the Boston Public Garden, Sean is able to deliver his legendary monologue about love and loss. I recall being most struck by the idea that one could know the facts about the Sistine Chapel but not be able to capture the experience of standing there and being aware of the scents. It serves as a major turning point in the film, breaking through Will’s intellectual defense mechanisms to share what is experiential knowledge. By sitting side-by-side in nature, Sean is able to deliver this insightful and challenging message.

The Anchor of Time

Because park benches are static public fixtures, directors often use them to ground a story that spans months or years. Returning to the exact same bench highlights how much the characters have changed against a backdrop that remains exactly the same.

One of my favorites on this theme is (500) Days of Summer (2009), where a bench at Angels Knoll in Los Angeles is used to track Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer’s (Zooey Deschanel) relationship. Early on, they sit there when they are in love. Later, they return to it at the very end to say a bittersweet, mature goodbye. It is the perfect backdrop to show how humans grow and change, how their perspectives on destiny have flipped, while the place stays the same.

The Equalizer

A park bench is completely democratic; a billionaire, a college student, and an unhoused person all have an equal right to sit on it. It acts as a staging ground for many different worlds to collide.

An absolute classic example of this is Forrest Gump (1994), which uses a bus stop bench as the ultimate framing device where a simple man shares his extraordinary life ledger with total strangers. The bench is in all the film posters. He was able to share his story with so many people while staying in one place.

The Romantic “Ache”

In romance, a park bench overlooking a cityscape or water creates an instant sense of yearning. It beautifully isolates the couple from the rush of the world around them.

Who else but Woody Allen could capture this better for New York City? In Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit on a bench at dawn looking at the Queensboro Bridge. The bench serves as a quiet pedestal for them to romanticize both each other and the city itself. How many people have visited that bridge with the hope of capturing that feeling?

One of my more recent favorite romantic bench scenes is from ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.’ In this musical comedy-drama, the park bench is a structural anchor for Zoey. In the final scene of the Season 2 finale, Max finds Zoey sitting on “their bench,” processing massive emotional exhaustion. Sitting on the bench triggers a profound psychological shift in Zoey. So, instead of Max singing his feelings to Zoey (the trend for the first two seasons), Zoey expresses her true feelings, and unexpectedly breaks out into a “heart song” of her own — singing Modern English’s “I Melt With You” directly to Max. By using the bench as the setting for this performance, the directors perfectly isolated the couple in a “private bubble” within a public space.

The Park Bench in ‘Voicemails for Isabelle’ (2026)

Back to the Netflix film Voicemails for Isabelle. It uses all of these tropes.

The Romantic “Ache” in Action: By placing the characters on a perch overlooking a massive, iconic cityscape and water, the film isolates them from the chaotic rush of San Francisco. It creates a “private bubble” within a highly public landscape, allowing the two characters to transition from strangers into a shared, intimate emotional space where they can naturally bond over their shared backgrounds.

The Side-by-Side Shift: Jill is mourning the tragic loss of her sister, and Wes has secretly been listening to her deeply personal, redirected grief voicemails. Facing each other directly to bridge this level of emotional baggage would feel intensely confrontational. By utilizing outdoor, side-by-side scenic seating for their initial heart-to-heart, the characters share the exact same physical perspective looking out at the bridge. This alignment allows Jill to drop her guard regarding her grief, and gives Wes the spatial freedom to offer quiet, non-interrogative support.

The Reflection Pause: Just like the “Life Ledger” trope, this scenic spot acts as a literal pause in Jill’s journey. Jill retreats to her bridge-view spot precisely when she is feeling stuck, grieving, or overwhelmed by the demands of her daily life, making the location a static structural anchor for her internal transformation.

Do you have a park bench for your love story or one that serves as the structural anchor to your life?

Socializing is Better on the Side

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for slow socializing. I understand that this preference for quieter gatherings is backed by significant recent behavioral data. Eventbrite’s 2026 Social Study, which surveyed over 4,000 adults in the U.S. and UK, found that 58% of respondents say that while socializing is vital to them, they do not want it to be the main event. Interestingly, this is also in line with the findings of the German Loneliness Barometer (2024), which notes that young adults aged 18 to 29 have increased their pursuit of organized artistic and musical activities by 8.3% since 2019. The shared lack of expertise in these activities acts as an equalizer for the soft socializing that comes with learning new skills together.

Generally, soft socializing offers a shared space of silence, which is a restorative response. This specific type of silence, emotionally connected rather than socially awkward, is a sign of connectedness. What seems to make it different now is that it is an intentional move toward low-pressure, activity-based hangouts. I equate the feeling to being on road trips with my friends. We could chat about everything and nothing. Or, we could all belt out the lyrics loudly and usually out of tune to our favorite songs with the scenery rushing past. The movement allows natural pauses in conversation and in our own thoughts.

Social Health as a Modern Metric of Societal Wealth

I can see the rise of soft socializing as a vital response to a public health crisis. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warned in 2023 that social isolation is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That really stuck with me. As I sought to understand this a bit better, what I also found is that it is important to distinguish between “social loneliness” (Weiss, 1973) and “emotional loneliness” (Luhmann, 2022). Emotional loneliness is the perceived lack of quality in relationships with close people. Whereas, social loneliness refers to lack of engagement in social groups, like neighbors, acquaintances, religious communities, etc.

Authentic friendship and relationship quality requires repeated unplanned interactions and a shared activity. The New York Times often sets out different challenges to engage its readers. This summer it is the Touch Grass Challenge to get people off of their phones. Week 3’s activity was a ‘90s-style hangout as described above, and it ended with the writer sitting on a park bench with a friend, in comfortable silence, watching passersby. Without phones in hand, the whole event offered a chance for the writer to pay more attention to friends present, to let a conversation meander, for time to pass without measure or interruption. The pauses were natural and easily filled again with more meaningful questions or silly observations. That is what brings us closer to really seeing one another and having real emotional depth in our relationships.

Social interactions can be formal, like organized clubs or volunteering, or more informal. Both are necessary, for range and for frequency. Loads of other happiness research shows that these small, kind interactions increase our sense of belonging. Jennifer Kent, an urbanism researcher (did not know such jobs existed!) at the University of Sydney, points to research on “incidental interactions” — the small, unorganized exchanges like nodding to a neighbor or chatting at the market. As Kent notes, citing Wang et al. (2018), without such interaction, the regulation of cellular processes deep within the body is disrupted, predisposing us to premature aging and, ultimately, premature mortality. And of course, urban spaces designed for soft socializing — parks with ample seating or community markets — encourage us to linger and shift to slower gears. Other pause-inducing features of urban design include interesting public art, an assortment of flowering trees, a body of water, and natural wildlife such as birds, squirrels, and other small animals.

Reclaiming the Right to be Unremarkable

Soft socializing is not a retreat from the world but a return to foundational connections, to one another and to the society in which we live. It is a quiet reclaiming of the right to be unremarkable, authentic, and less curated. I think again of that Tuesday evening — the puzzle, the sketchbook, the book left open on someone’s knee. No one there was performing connection. They were just in it, together. That is the rhythm we’re all trying to find our way back to.

What’s your favorite soft socializing activity? Drop a comment or find me on a park bench — that’s where the best socializing happens.

The parks have been filled with graduation celebrations — during the day, the young ones finishing kindergarten, and in the evenings into the night, the older ones finishing high school (Abitur). A heat wave arrived in between the normal summer weather, which posed its own challenge. The young ones were enjoying the rapidly melting ice creams, fingers sticky and sweet. The teenage revelers enjoyed the late evening light, laughing, dancing to their music, and refusing to think about tomorrow. Watching them, I thought of the Kid Rock song “All Summer Long” — that suspended sense of time, enjoyed in a way only possible on the cusp of adulthood.

A World Cup Summer

We’re also in the middle of a World Cup Football summer, with national flags and public outdoor viewings across Germany. The atmosphere is contagious — fans sitting together, watching every move with tension and excitement. Germany is out, but the flags for other nations still fly, and the viewing parties carry on into the cooler weather after the heat wave. Much like the Olympics, it’s a season for celebrating affiliated countries and teams, win or lose. And, through such sporting events we connect the diaspora around the world and share a bit of our culture in the host country.

Fête de la Musique, Paris

Alongside the heat wave came news of summer solstice celebrations across Europe. I was especially glad to read about the energy of Paris’s Fête de la Musique — residents and revelers turning toward the music, less social media and more movement. During and after Corona, I often wondered if Gen Z was missing out on essential lived experiences of youth. Too much of their life was experienced virtually, made for short happy viewing pleasure. The kind of partying at such a festival that flows unexpectedly is mesmerizing. It reflects a collective mood and people syncing to the rhythm of music in real time. I remember the haze of heat and music at summer music festivals of my youth. Those are the nights when memories get made that no Instagram reel can capture.

Midsummer in Sweden

Photos and updates from family and friends celebrating Midsummer in Sweden have been filling my feed. The solstice celebrations there are nearly as big as Christmas — flowers everywhere, people in traditional dress dancing around a maypole, and the sun barely setting through the night. Old colleagues told me it also marks the start of the Swedish summer holiday season, when most people head to their summer cottages or boats. The whole of Sweden seems to be taking a collective pause, recharging themselves in the warmth and sun. What better way to kick-off the season than reveling in the longest day of the year.

Fourth of July, American-Style

This week brings the Fourth of July in the USA — parades, fireworks, barbecues. As a kid, I loved catching fireflies as they buzzed around at dusk. It was also the season with no end to watermelon, corn on the cob, and yellow summer squash. Weekdays meant the pool; weekends meant Fall Creek Falls State Park, where the water was just cool enough to make the heat bearable. On this national holiday, all of us from different ethnic backgrounds celebrated being American. As the nation prepares extravagant 250th anniversary celebrations, I am glad for that diversity.

The Common Thread

What strikes me most about this moment — across Europe and the US — is a collective need to release, to have fun, to set down the heaviness and seriousness of the world for a while. It’s a season to be human: to celebrate the senses and emotions of being human.

I’ll close with Kid Rock:

“Now nothing seems as strange as when the leaves began to change, Or how we thought those days would never end.”

What’s your version of summer abandon? Drop a comment or find me on a park bench — that’s where the best stories start.

I am not a bird watcher but I do like to know what birds are in our area. In our neighborhood I generally see the following birds: Eurasian Blackbird, Great Tit, European Robins, Eurasian Magpie and of course Crows and Pigeons. Occasionally, we have a Buzzard swooping over our garden to pick up an unlucky field mouse. In our old neighborhood, we unfortunately had woodpeckers that for a while consistently woke us up. Some of our neighbors took to hanging up shiny reflective objects on the rooftop corners of their house to ward away the woodpeckers. When the sunlight hit them just right, the refracted light made it feel like we lived in a disco neighborhood.

Now the weather is warming up for the heat wave we will have on the weekend. In the morning, we had what felt like a monsoon rain, humid, warm and torrential for twenty minutes. The birds were at it again, as if warning each other of what was to come over the day. I was reminded of a poem I recently read.

Birdsong of Shaker Way

BY ANN-MARGARET LIM


Every day is perfect, if
when you wake, you hear birds
in the garden, in the yard. Birds

up and down, ushering in one more day
in all the houses on Shaker Way. Birds
on telephone lines, light posts. Birds

twit, twittering on trees
hailing fellow birds
with a nod of  beak—gray kingbird;

top-hatted, streamertail
tuxedoed, doctor bird—
busy-bodied hummingbird

tucking in, out, of pink, red ixoras
punch-drunk in love. Birds
preening for, chatting up other birds—

the oriole, the grass quit, in mid-song
on the lawn, in a dance of  birds
an all-day-long conference of bird;

red-headed woodpecker
—drummer boy, or girl bird
in this daily symphony of  birds

—an orchestra on Shaker Way
in serenade of each perfect day with birds—
from the very first mockingbird

heralding, in solo warble
one more day, filled with birds—
brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:

precious, diamond-throated
sweet song, miracle-toting birds
the-gift-of-day-is-here birds.

Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird.
You lift me up bird.
You sing the day beautiful, bird.

I especially love the first line about how birdsong make everyday perfect. I try to catch morning or evening birdsong wherever I go. For me, it is the natural soundtrack to a city neighborhood. My fellow Hamburgers have found that birdsong reduces anxiety and irrational thoughts, or paranoia. It is yet another sense that is activated when one is in nature, the ultimate salve for our overactive and wearied minds.

This got me thinking about urban design and more specifically what I like about other cities I have lived in or visited. In Europe, most cities are very old and established. They have a mix of architecture through centuries, not just decades. They carry the ideas urban planners who designed for people walking or moving goods with carriages and horses. I particularly am fond of the roundabouts in the United Kingdom that were designed to keep traffic flowing.

Interestingly, in Germany, the government long ago set a goal of significantly increasing the amount of green space, especially near residential developments. Their stated aim is to ‘harmonize social, economic, health-related and environmental planning requirements.’ I love that government white papers state “Authorities, citizens, companies and stakeholders must regard the development and maintenance of high-quality, sustainable public spaces, including open green spaces, as a common task,’’ as part of urban panning directives.

While making citifies walkable may seem to some as a climate-reactionary, a way to reduce vehicle emissions, the benefits have long been touted. Urban theorists, like Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, found that urban vitality, or vibe, is only found when human density is combined with the physical routes and spaces that allow for intense and diverse human overlap, imagine a ‘sidewalk ballet.’ These daily interactions between neighbors and strangers creates a community built on mutual trust.

Phil Roeder, Nighttime in Greenwich Village
Photograph public domain

I see this in my own neighborhood. Within a 15-minute walk, I can access doctors, pharmacy, hair dressers, bakeries, restaurants, and shopping. It was the same when we lived in London, well frankly most cities we have visited in Europe. The tree-lined streets, the nearby parks, the wide sidewalks and bicycle lanes, as well as reliable public transportation, all make it a comfortable place to live. In contrast, where I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, one always had to get in a car to get anywhere. And, there were hardly sidewalks in our residential areas to even casually run into neighbors.

As we a a society continue to urbanize, I am glad to advocate for public spaces. We need them not only for improving air quality and reducing urban heat, but as importantly for relaxation and fostering social interaction.

Sunday morning, the sky was clear and the warmth of the day was just starting to rise. I was walking the dog through one of our nearby parks to enjoy the view from the bench. It is my quiet time, usually not very crowded so one can get lost in one’s thoughts. As we left, a lady was coming towards us from the opposite direction. She carried a book in one arm and a coffee in the other hand. I knew where she was headed. What better way to ease into the day than with a good book, a hot drink and a brilliant view in the fresh air.

Blankenese

Soft socializing.

As we walked further, we passing the church in the district square with parishioners entering. Some of the older folks waited patiently on a bench to be escorted inside. Then we passed fathers picking up breakfast rolls with the little ones in strollers or walking hand in hand. The little ones could not wait wait to eat their franzbrotchen, so they sat on the nearby bench. All along the way, the families ran into friends and neighbors and had a short chat.

Softening focus.

Outdoor spaces, especially green ones, are calming. The health benefits of being outside, seeing the sun, focusing on the colors of green and blue, and breathing fresh air are well-known. I regularly get out of the house to walk and sit in the park. Some times I might even be on the phone to friends or colleagues. Other times, I just need a quiet place to think and clear my head. Studies say exposure to nature lowers cortisol levels and restores cognitive attention. In turn, this reduces anxiety and improves mental wellbeing. I can fully subscribe to this in my experience.

I finding it is an amazingly simple reset to stress or anxiety to just sit for a few minutes staring into nature. There is no app required, (unless you are using my parkbenchnearme.com to find a bench!) there is no cost to taking the space or the air, and there is no stigma in sitting and watching the world go by for a while. Allowing the mind to rest and visual adjust away from screen is part is a daily habit of slow living.

Here is one of my favorite views from a bench in Baurs Park, Hamburg overlooking the Elbe River.

The request for finding park benches came out of a request from my daughter

My daughter came home one day with a friend. It was a warm, sunny day and they wanted to be outside in the city. They had been walking around for ages with a cold drinks in hand looking for a place to sit and have a chat. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an app to find park benches near me?” they asked retorically.

So I thought, why not build one?

I have spent my career in tech — hardware, software, cloud and more recently with data and AI. I actually studied engineering because I could not get my portfolio of hand-drawn sketches together for admissions into architecture programs. Now, with all the new tools that are available, I thought I will just see what I can build that can bring together communities online and offline.

Click to view the app

Park Bench

Local community accessible to all

I have always been interested in the dialogue of public/private spaces. And, lately I have been thinking about how that also applies to digital space and urban planning. This will be a space where I explore topics related to the built environment and society; how people use public spaces and how those spaces become part of their individual and collective memories.

I will be posting every two weeks. I am open to guest essays if anyone would like to contribute their perspective or expertise. This is a creative space for me and I will keep it free. All I ask is if you find something interesting or you want to reference it, please just link/credit it back to me.

A word about the tech

I used Claude to help me understand what types of maps I may be able to access as well as see if there were soltuions already availabe. Though I found two others using the same Open Street Maps (OSM) data, they did not deliver the same type of experience I wanted to offer around community building. Then I asked Claude the pros and cons of different app and web building tools. I decided to go with Loveable even though it was not on the top of the list. My decision was mainly based on the the other recommendations being more for developers, though easy to use. I did not want to get lost in the weeds of coding and API calls. I wanted something that could evolve with me and still allow me to question certain aspects of the build. And I wanted to be EU based. Interestingly enough, Loveable is built using Claude Code, it is based in the EU (GDPR requirements built-in), it is hosted on AWS (full-disclosure, a former employer) and one of the investor is out of Hamburg.