If you’ve ever stood at a bus stop with no place to sit, you know the frustration that sparked one of the most charming acts of civic rebellion in America.
A grassroots group called To Nashville, With Love has built and quietly installed more than 50 handmade wooden benches at bus stops across Nashville. They didn't secure permits, ask for permission, or go through a bureaucratic process. They just built the benches! With lumber, screws, and the conviction that a place to sit is one of the basic things that makes a city welcoming.
The Nashville Department of Transportation wasn't pleased. Citing right-of-way concerns, NDOT confiscated more than a dozen of the benches, prompting volunteers to retrieve some of them and announce a bench-building party with the rallying cry: “For every seat removed, two shall take its place.” Now the city is trying to fold the effort into its formal Tactical Urbanism Program, which lets residents pilot their own street-level fixes.
David Plotz talks with City Cast Nashville host Marie Cecile Anderson about the whole strange standoff: what guerrilla urbanism gets right, why a tourist-magnet city has been so slow on the basics of public infrastructure, and whether DIY can ever scale to fix what governments won’t.
Nashville’s guerilla bench project isn’t perfect, but it is serving the public — in a way that other cities should be watching.
Tune in to this episode of “Your City Could Be Better” to assess whether your city needs a guerrilla movement of its own.
What is the ‘Your City Could Be Better’ Podcast?
Cities are great. But they could be better! That’s why every Friday, City Cast CEO David Plotz sits down with local insiders from across the City Cast podcast network, to talk through what their cities are doing right and sometimes wrong, the weird things they’re trying, and the surprising successes — so that we can all learn how to make our cities a little bit better.
Listen to “Your City Could Be Better” on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
