NAKED CITY: Benches, Bollards & Bollocks!

Look out – the City of Sydney Council is scouting for new furniture. No, they’re not off to Ikea and Fantastic Furniture to give the Town Hall a post Ga Ga makeover. It’s so-called ‘street furniture’ they’re after and they have just put out a tender for new and innovative designs.

If you are old school like us you think of street furniture as the rather battered but nevertheless welcoming park bench in your local park – not the dinky little designer baby seats that now litter the Pitt Street Mall. Gone are the days however when open spaces and bus shelters offered the wearied pedestrian an opportunity to park their bum for a few idle moments.

These days it’s all about the cosmetic and a sinister hidden agenda planned to shut out everybody from the homeless to the city’s last remaining gaggle of eccentrics. The revamped bus terminal at Railway Square set the standard some years ago with its totally minimalist seating (i.e. a tubular rail) and an almost complete lack of shelter from the elements. Nobody bedding down for the night there!

Even more questionable was the water feature makeover at Taylor Square accompanied by the reckless deforestation of Gilligans Island. Try finding anywhere comfy to plonk yourself down in this orgy of post urban deconstruction and you are likely to receive a most unwelcome enema. Indeed for many years it was rumoured that the randomly sprouting water jets were controlled by a secret camera and a team of clandestine Council Rangers, all aimed at keeping undesirables from the precinct.

So what you may ask have the City Council in store for us with the latest adornment of public seating, pay toilets, garbage bins and unexpected colonic irrigation?. No doubt the tenderers for the new street furniture will run riot with all manner of eco friendly, homeless unfriendly, neo-brutalist designs. One concept already mooted is the  Bourke Street bicycle chair, a stationary fixture on the cycle path itself which when pedalled generates a not insignificant amount of electricity and also creates the illusion that the path is actually being used.

The soon to be opened community garden in Wolloomooloo is big on water recycling, with a particular emphasis on the new eco-latrine block. Be prepared for the concept to be extended to the controversial Kings Cross pissoirs where recycled urine will be pumped into the nearby Al Alamein fountain. If the fountain takes on eery yellow glow in the early hours of Saturday morning then be patient, nothing is perfect to begin with.

And finally, perhaps the most dastardly innovation of them all with the Council considering a plan for a series of coin in the slot park benches to replace all existing seating in Hyde Park. Like parking meters and the pay to use loos, the new high tech seating would be a great revenue raiser and yet another opportunity to shut out the down and out who couldn’t afford the $2 a hour sit down fee. A mild but unpleasant electric charge would keep the seats vacant until the pay mechanism was activated. All part of the brave new world of benches, bollards and just plain old bollocks!