A look at public behaviour in a public space

For the fieldwork this week we had to observe the behaviour of people in public space. One aspect of this we thought it would be interesting to tackle the way people interact a square. The square we decided to look at is just off Tottenham Court Road and is also bordered by Tottenham Street. We sat in the square for an hour or two, towards the end of most people’s office lunch hour.

We found that the three most common uses of the square were: as a shortcut, to eat lunch, and to sit down and have a smoke.

When people were walking through the square, the paths they took the most frequently were the diagonals.

Factors that we thought could have affected the frequency of when people walked through the square were pigeons and the people in the square. For example if there were loads of people in the using the square to sit down, the flow of people walking through the square decreased. However, when the square was more or less empty the flow of people walking through the square increased significantly. We are not saying that this is a direct cause but there is definitely a correlation between the two.

The square in question is home to quite a lot of pigeons. When they were being fed or swarming people’s left over food, we found that the amount of people walking through the square shrunk dramatically. In one case, it also affected somebody who was sitting down as they moved to a different part of the square to get away from the flock of birds. Like with the amount of people in the square, we are not explicitly trying to say that pigeons are a cause but there is a definite correlation.

Another feature of the square we found interesting about the way people used the square was the amount of people who used it by themselves. The majority of the people who were sitting down in the square, whether it was to smoke or to have lunch, were sitting down by themselves. What became interesting about this was the fact that when most of these people were alone they were using their mobile phones. This could be because they did not want to appear lonely in such an open public space.

The final aspect of this particular square we found to be of interest was the type of people who were using the square. Firstly, given the proximity of the square to the university we found it slightly odd that there didn’t appear to be many students using the square. Secondly, the people who were dressed more smartly (we assumed these to have jobs in the city) spent the least amount of time in the square. The final point we observed was that the people who spent the longest periods of time in the square seemed to be lower class. For example, we observed two men drinking, indiscreetly, in the middle of the afternoon. We also saw one man rummaging through a bin. The thing that cemented this opinion for us was the fact that a community support officer took a complete detour to see the people in the square and then began questioning two men who were sat down. A factor we put this down to was the grottiness and lack of cleanliness of the square.