What do you think about sleeping in public?

My college library always had a very soporific effect on me and many others.

I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with good ol’ Christopher on this one. I hate it when I fall asleep in public, and I go to great lengths to avoid it. Sleeping in public is for people who don’t have a private place to sleep, like a home.

Sleeping during the day, unless on a train or in a car, is one of those valuable skills that elude me, but I love being able to curl up with a book or my thoughts in some cozy public venue. Bookstores give me fuzzy feelings all over.

Dozing off in a sunny quad on a spring day with your botany book on your face is a different matter from living on a park bench. And both are different from the occasional helpless nap during a long lecture or sermon. I think the circumstances matter. But I don’t particularly think it is wise to encourage the practice as a general rule. Public sleepers embarrass others, drive others away, and make themselves very vulnerable.

I’ll take sleep any time I can get it. It’s not nearly offensive as PDA.

@aeschylus, this is so odd. You’re the second person I’ve encountered who mentioned A Pattern Language in the last 24 hours…

@AlfredaPrufrock
Hmmm, sounds like a pattern.

Sorry, I couldn’t stop myself.

LOL. It’s not exactly “The Complete Works of Shakespeare,” where you would expect people to be familiar with it, is it?

More places should provide opportunities to nap. Airport design should incorporate better napping space, as extended waiting usually puts me out at the drop of a hat. I wish sleeping porches would come back on houses, or sheltered areas in a garden, with a hammock.

I can fall asleep outside if I’m at my own house, out on the boat, or something like that. But I don’t want to fall asleep around strangers.

Proper sound integration into the space makes it conducive to sleep.

I like the idea of public spaces that evoke such a degree of safety and comfort that people feel at ease enough to have the odd nap. Seeing a homeless person sleeping in a corner or alley makes me quite sad, but that is entirely different from seeing a bunch of people relaxing in a park with the odd person catching a few zzz’s under a tree, or someone dozing off on their towel at the beach. I don’t see that public sleepers would embarrass people as long as it didn’t seem that they were only sleeping there due to a lack of proper sleeping quarters.

@elijahsuicide Hm, that’s an interesting sentiment. Where do you often go that you are around strangers? Odd how we allow our cities to be planned in such a way that we are always placed around strangers, with no spatial meaning to a community. Sigh.

I’m in college…my entire campus is a reasonable place to sleep as long as it is warm and has something soft to sit/lay on. I have more than a few times fallen asleep wherever was most convenient, as have many people I know. I am pretty sure the addition of couches to basically any public space makes it a possible sleep space!

@aeschylus, I think the problem stems from sidewalk design being to utilitarian, and cost constrained. Sidewalks should be an extension of the buildings and houses that front on them. Imagine if all sidewalks 10 – 12 feet deep, allowing for landscaping and plantings, and the addition of seating at street level in front of homes. How much more conducive to walking and socializing that would be!

my 4th hour class must be considered incredibly successful by this Christopher Alexander guy. no one seems to hesitate to fall asleep as soon as they sit down in there.

We’re always around strangers in public. I think the key is the delineation of space.
It seems impossible to fall asleep in a space where you don’t feel comfortable.
Not just comfortable to move through or to be in the space.
but to almost have a temporary sense of ownership.

However, I don’t think a public lobby is the best place to be designed this way.
While it should feel open to all users, I think it should be more of a place of transition.

I find sleeping in public to be occasionally inevitable. Once I fell asleep in the Boston Public Garden with my head on my purse for safety. When I woke up there was a gentle hippie guy sitting there watching over me. No hassle. Just kindness.

I’d really like to see airports create Quiet Zones, areas where talking, music and especially cell phone conversations are forbidden (re highly discouraged).

Hm, I think that the second time airports have been mentioned. There is an awful lot of waiting going on in airports. How would you design such a place to fit into the flow of airport travel? I imagine one problem would be the safety of luggage.

I think the delineation of the space would be very important, but I wonder how it would be delineated, especially in the ubiquitous airport model of concentric rings of waiting. Somehow you’d need to totally re-organize the gate area.

Airport seating is made so you can’t sleep in it. I did get around that in my student days, with 8-hour waits at O’Hare for morning flights, but it wasn’t easy. Anyone can go to the airport and hang out. They don’t want to provide a free alternate shelter for street people.

@Jeruba: Nobody wants to provide free alternate shelter for street people. But if we had some, airports could provide safe places for exhausted legitimate travelers to lie down.

I lie down threaded UNDER the arms of the adjoining chairs whose arms are supposed to keep people from lying down. And once in some airport in France I just laid down behind my husband’s legs under a row of seats. Luckily, he wasn’t the kind of shitty husband that would rather have a presentable wife than a rested one.