This 4-mile bench could someday snake through downtown San Francisco

In cities across the world, urban design is increasingly oriented around preventing people from resting. Details like seats with bisecting railings, ledges with embedded spikes, and railings instead of benches are just a few ways that “hostile architecture”—or architecture that makes public spaces less accessible, especially to unhoused people—shows up in city landscapes. 

Now, a design firm in San Francisco wants to flip that narrative on its head by doing the exact opposite: building a four-mile-long bench.

The concept, created by the firm Sitelab Urban Studio, is one of six winners of “Market Street Reimagined,” an international call for design proposals to rejuvenate San Francisco’s downtown Market Street. According to Laura Crescimano, cofounder and principal of Sitelab, the firm previously identified “the shocking lack of seating downtown” through a project called the Downtown San Francisco Public Realm Action Plan, an effort aimed at bringing urban activity back to the city’s financial district post-pandemic. So, when the opportunity to rethink Market Street’s design came up, her team realized that there might be a deceptively simple solution.

“In recent projects, we have seen the removal of fixed benches and an overall preference for movable seating over fixed seating—it’s less expensive, can be stored overnight, and moved around,” Crescimano says. “These trends reflect a broader pattern of designing out rest and permanence, which is why we believe bold interventions—like our 4-Mile Bench proposal—are needed to reframe seating as essential civic infrastructure.”

A 10,000-seat bench

The proposal is essentially what it sounds like: a 4-mile-long, bright yellow bench that would make one big loop around Market Street, offering a whopping 10,000 seats for residents and tourists. Given the scale of the project and the business of the street, Crescimano says, the idea is built with modularity in mind, using an off-the-shelf system offered by the company Landscape Forms that can easily be built and maintained segment-by-segment. 

Market Street’s existing constraints actually made way for some of the bench’s more interesting features. To avoid reworking infrastructure like signs, trees, and lightposts, the bench is imagined as a playfully curving line weaving through and around these obstacles. And, to make the seating as interactive as possible, Sitelab added custom components like swings, tables, and loops that periodically interrupt the bench’s flow.

“It is a spectacle meant to draw in visitors from locals to tourists—a recognizable, Instagrammable moment,” Crescimano says. “It is also at a scale to be a platform and backdrop for major events, from the Pride parade, to protests, to celebrating the Warriors or Giants wins. In contrast to past approaches that removed seating to discourage certain behaviors, this proposal invites everyone in and encourages more foot traffic.”

While the 4-Mile Bench is still at the proposal phase, Crescimano says Sitelab has already received interest on a potential pilot project. To make the bench a reality, she adds, the team’s next steps would include meeting with city officials and property owners to refine the design and identifying several blocks along Market Street as a starting point. She sees the 4-Mile Bench as a concept that “reimagines Market Street from a place of scarcity to one of abundance,” choosing to lean into the positive rather than designing to mitigate risk.

“We want this bench to be a place for everyone—it’s not about restricting how people use it,” Crescimano says. “The reality of homelessness is complex and ever-present, and instead of designing from a place of exclusion, we’re hoping to expand the idea of who our streets can serve. We started our practice in San Francisco, and that spirit of openness is what we’ve always loved about the city.”