In the Midst of Things - The Social Life of Objects in Public Spaces

by Mike Owen Benediktsson, Princeton University Press, 2022 

First, there is a note, on the second to last page, on the typography used in the book, and that it's Adobe Text and Gotham, and that "Gotham, inspired by New York street signs, was designed by Tobias-Frere-Jones for Hoefler and Co.; something I've never seen before.

• "We shape our buildings, and after, our buildings shape us." -Winston Churchill
• The "informal proxemics" of the street vs Covid lockdown (on his writing this book during covid) pxi
• "What we generally do not see, is that [manmade] objects have ideas in them ... Sometimes, the ideas that are designed into objects are oriented on individual human users. Other times, they involve social norms or relationships ... ." p1
• public objects vs private possessions p2

This book is so beautifully organized:

1. Appearance - Public Lawn, Folding Chair

2. Disruption - Traffic Divider, Subway Door

3. Disappearance - Newsstand, Bench

• This book seems to be (or I want it to be) about the trans-substantiation of material objects into ideas, policies, laws, etc., something about dematerialization and "the objects as intermediary" between the physical and the social ~p3
• "Material Sociology" which he says "is not really a thing" p3
• Objects "fix the contents" of society, George Simmel p4
• "Obviously, objects enter into our social consciousness practically every day. They are useful metaphors - they make abstract social processes more concrete. We communicate using an everyday poetry that links material things in our social world, without thinking about why these linguistic shortcuts work. We know that the "white collar worker" or "pencil-pusher" is different from the "blue-collar worker" or "hardhat." The "latte-sipping elitist" is different from "Joe sixpack." The "white tablecloth banquet" is different from the "brown bag lunch." Social structure is not something we can easily see or feel, so we refer to its material correlates, in a form of metonymy." p4
• "Affordances" are "the ideas objects have about us" [this sounds much like Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants and Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene, aka We Don't Wear Earrings. Earrings Wear Us]; "the behavioral possibilities that are endorsed by an object or places." "Affordances do not exist inside of an object, but in the relationship between an object and a person" p4-5
• "Programming" is the act of embedding affordances in an object or place ... used to suggest what should be done (or not done). p5
• Once programmed into the material surfaces of an object or a place, affordances can become physically coercive in their control over human behavior p5
• "Symbolic Programming" are signs and labels that reinforce intended behavior. p5
• "Institutional Programming" is typically invisible; they may be written down, but most likely are simply known by users. ... it implies a third party who provides incentives and sanctions, such as a property owner, an anonymous stranger, a neighbor, or the government. "Sidewalks because they are public, are institutionally programmed, or regulated, in a way that one's living room is not." ... when they're effective, they're invisible. p6
• When public objects fail, they disrupt the social order (repurposing Harold Garfunkel) p6
• All blueprints are blueprints for human behavior (from Thomas Gieryn)
• Design professionals translate social context into material form. p7
• In the real world, after a thing is built, and real people show up: The "potential environment" envisioned by the designers and planners is supplanted by the "effective environment" created through human use. (these terms invented by sociologist Herbert Gans) p8
• Home telephones were initially intrusive. p8
• The real test is when an object enters the sociological wilderness of unpredictable, everyday life. p9
• Entropy! footnote 22
• Some public objects reveal their broader importance to a community when threatened or removed. p11
• The subway pole is the fireman's pole is the stripper pole. Things are given meaning by the place in which they're found. p13
• Public objects are Rosetta stones, decoding the sociology of urban life. p16
• "The social role of material objects is invisible under most circumstances." p16
• On the Traffic Divider (the Social Divider!) p18
• On the Subway Door - "informal infrastructure," i.e., passenger etiquette: disruptions beget behavioral engineering [nice word], like turnstyles. p18-19
• "These spaces are physically open, but sociologically closed, earmaked for certain kinds of rituals." p24
• Olmstead on public lawns and the single most important benefit provided by an urban park, "escape from the cramped, confined and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town: in other words, a sense of enlarged freedom." He wanted no fences and no walls around his parks, so you could see right through them from one side to the other. (Olmstead, 1866) p24
• The lawn, originally represented exclusivity and privilege, costly to maintain, and visible from outside the house ... "grass externalizes and manifests socioeconomic status" p33
• Ownership vs Usership - this is where the condos in the park of One Brooklyn Bridge Park were advertised to a specific sub-population who would use it in a specific way. They won't own the property, but they do, sort-of, because what it affords is accessible to and desired by them. p36

• The folding chair "is an expression of trust in the urban society itself'. p61
• The Wiley-Smartz NYC DOT Public Space Unit put maintenance under local partners, not the city, to avoid a race to the bottom. p61
• 2013 "desnudas" in Times Square (naked women with painted-on bikinis). Totally legal btw. By 2015 he says it was being called a strip club without walls because men would line up their chairs and watch for hours. ... also considering "Times Square as a mecca of tourism and unrestrained commercialism", it was hard to avoid. p65-66
• Single men are limited in their use fo public space; in playgrounds and ball fields they look like predators. p70
• When La Plaza de las Americas in Washington Heights was opened, "They knew what to do here" [says a park inhabitant when interviewed] because they had plazas in the countries where they came from. p73
• Social activity itself discourages disorder and encourages informal social control (like Jane Jacobs' eyes on the street) p81
• [I see "White" people capitalized for the first time (2022)] p85
• "Flexible public space is an expression of trust in urban society. But not all communities trust themselves." p90
• There's a great and illustrative picture on p 102 that shows the walking path along Black and White Horse Pike in South Jersey, with a 55 MPH speed limit sign, mangled by an 18-wheeler probably going a lot faster than 55. He also uses the word "fear lines" in opposition to "desire lines" ~p106
• "There exists an entire world of inconvenience and humiliation for the pedestrian users of this space." p108
• And he makes reference to upstairs/downstairs and front/back of the house "vibrating w programmatic conflict" 
• Infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks. p109 ft 25 SL Star...
• Signs and symbols act to clarify the program embedded in a materials object, or to specify a legally endorsed pattern of behavior. They act as a stopgap in cases where the built environment is deemed insufficiently legible by the people or institutions who are responding to programmatic conflict. p114
• [We domesticate technology, through recursion from raw tech to normative infst] ~p126
• "feral technology" p131
• He's talking about sociothermodynamics, the space and the mental organization of behavior in it, by it, is what causes altercations; it's not the personalities of the people, it's the space they're in and how it's designed (like people waiting for a train that's late, or trying to fit on a train that's crowded), and he says one of the causes is "temporal ambiguity" in the breakdown of normative infrastructure. p150-152
• [personal thought] graffiti on buses (and subways) pre-dated advertisements on buses
•  (I didn't jux these, it was him, but I think its cool)
• The newsstand - more than just an amenity for anonymous pedestrians - an integral part of the social fabric of a block. p183
• ...a city loses something when people stop asking for directions. 
• The "benevolent friction" of the newsstand p186

The Bench - this is why I bought the book. I inhabit New York City often, and use mass transit infrastructure, which includes the stations, but which themselves do not include places to sit, and I've often wondered about how treating homeless people like shit actually leads to treating just about everyone like shit, because I'm not homeless, but after working on my feet for 14 hours, and facing a possible 2-hour commute home, I'd really like to sit down in the train station while I wait for my delayed or cancelled train.

• The Bench at Trump Tower - Which brings us to the matter of the bench. Public spaces are subject to a set of design provisions - among them, a stipulation that they contain ample public seating. Originally, the atrium contained a large marble bench, where the black metal benches currently sit; in order to satisfy this requirement. However, once he had benefitted from the bonus plaza provision, Trump began to undercut the public function of the space, repeatedly closing the atrium for private events and instructing his private security guards to deny public access, a pattern that drew the attention of city regulators. In 1984, Philip Schneider, of the New York City Planning Department, paid an unannounced visit to the atrium of Trump Tower and found the large marble bench covered with flowerpots that prevented its intended use. ... Eventually, after thousands of dollars in fines, Trump removed the flowerpots. Later, however, the marble bench disappeared entirely. In its place a massive kiosk of wood and glass labeled "Trump Store" appeared ... [Commercial structures in privately owned public space require permitting.] After the court ruled against Trump, the kiosk vanished. ... The black bench appeared in its place. p192-194
• Why bother thinking about everyday objects? The bench offers an answer: it suggests that there are no social forces, no crosscurrents of political or cultural upheaval so lofty and so remote that they do not produce telling reverberations in the material world. p194-195
• Reframed this way, the story of the bench does not just embody a broader drama pitting private interest against public well being. It illustrates the ability of materials objects to translate such drama into something far less grand, but also more tangible and more immediate. ... social control, inequality, unpredictability of material things in public spaces, interactions between the social and the material. p195
• When we engage with public objects, we typically make small decisions, or no decisions at all. p196 [that's why it can be called invisible]
• Things Exert Social Control - it's a section title, but my reason for reading a book like this. p197
• Power emerges more clearly into view via the aggregation of small-scale everyday encounters between people and things. p197
• He uses the word polysemic (p199), and that's the only time I've ever seen it written.