The contemporary challenges of “city living” are driving the coexistence of various initiatives capable of shaping a diverse and evolving urban environment. All types of developments, from large-scale traffic flows to small-scale local amenities, contribute to the construction of this collective space. Street furniture has the interesting characteristic of being a human-scale interface between people and the place they live in. Its anthropomorphic and familiar size makes street furniture a tool that can promote awareness of the major issues in urban planning and encourage citizens to take ownership of the public domain. In a democracy, the installation of street furniture is subject to consultation procedures with citizens organized into interest groups of varying degrees of permanence. In addition to legal, financial, and environmental constraints, as well as health and safety requirements, designers and architects are obliged to negotiate with civil society and its expectations and needs. How can innovation be achieved in such a context? This question is of concern not only to designers and urban planners who want their work to be relevant to the present, but also to public administrations seeking to invest in solutions that will build cities ready to meet the challenges of the future.

To answer this question, the City of Geneva and the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD-Geneva) conducted a design research project from October 2007 to November 2009. The Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva was involved in this project, which was funded by the Swiss Confederation's Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI). Entitled UrbanMob New, this multidisciplinary research project led to the creation of prototypes of street furniture that were installed in various neighborhoods in downtown Geneva during the summer of 2009.