Touching the City is a design research unit investigating the ways in which we interact with the city, observing the public realm and exploring our relationship with the unremarkable spaces we use and inhabit every day.

As we rush between home and work it is easy to avoid forming a personal relationship with - or an understanding - of the public aspects of the city. The morning commute spent in a domestic ‘miasma’ is exchanged for an office counterpart on the journey home. Though the city deploys many devices that seek to engage us, these collective and generalised attempts often do not break into our personal space and touch us as individuals.

We are interested in the physical and psychological space of the city, aiming to challenge the existing urban environment. Our work addresses the question of the free will of the individual in the city and asks what new kinds of relationship we might enjoy with(in) the city. Reflection on the interrelated circumstances that lead to the spontaneity or automaticity of the urban inhabitant led to a search for small sites where people might be observed in a reflective state: these places suggest special potential for the transformation of individual behaviours.

While the Mayor’s 100 Public Spaces - a schedule of sites across London marked for major improvement - are small in comparison with the development in progress for the Olympics or London Thames Gateway, they remain large in comparison with intimate, everyday spaces.

Observing the private life of the smallest-scale public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation. We began by exploring a special, unloved and unresolved realm between public and private space, which we call benchspace.