A woman eating lunch sits on a brick wall by the bike station, Silver Spring, Maryland, showing the value of places to sit in an area otherwise bereft of benche

1.  I am working on a position paper/blog entry about Silver Spring urban design matters, hence some little pieces.

2. On the other side of the Silver Spring Civic Center there are plenty of places to sit, and benches along Ellsworth Avenue, so it's not like there aren't places to sit in other parts of Silver Spring.

But this photo illustrates a point made by William F. Whyte in the book about placemaking called City: Rediscovering the Center, that people don't limit where they want to sit to where planners provide benches.  They want to sit in other places, and they will make do with what's available.

Note that I think that we could make a change for the better by reconfiguring such walls as benches from the outset.