Chair Theft as the Purest Form of Criticism

A while back, the BVG—Berlin’s public transit authority—quietly removed the benches from Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station. The reasoning was never quite stated plainly, but the logic was obvious: fewer places to sit meant fewer homeless people, fewer junkies, fewer dealers lingering on the platform. It’s the same thinking that puts metal spikes on ledges and removes public toilets—design as social policy, cruelty with plausible deniability.

The problem, which anyone could have predicted, is that benches don’t discriminate. The elderly, the disabled, anyone waiting for a connection with a bad knee or a heavy bag—they all got swept up in the same hostile architecture. So the Toy Crew, an anonymous Berlin collective of artists and activists, did what seemed reasonable: they walked into a BVG facility, borrowed some chairs, and placed them at the empty spots on the platform where the benches used to be.

The BVG presumably found this deeply unfunny. The chairs came from their own offices. The action was petty in the best possible sense—precise, proportionate, and it made the institution look exactly as absurd as it is. It wasn’t the first time either. The Toy Crew has filled a U-Bahn carriage with autumn leaves and hung flower boxes from S-Bahn windows, turning transit infrastructure into a running argument about what public space is actually for. The chairs at Kottbusser Tor are just the latest installment, and it’s an argument I find very hard to disagree with.