The senses are part of the everyday life of the people and they play an important role to experience the quality of public spaces. This paper addresses the question to what extend people co-presence in public spaces is related to their field of vision while they are seated in benches or movable chairs or just standing there. A method based on Isovists and Visibility Graph Analysis is proposed for the evaluation of space affordances concerning visibility, exposure, use, comfort and social interaction. Through the analysis of places, a more detailed and qualitative interpretation of the city is carried out. William Whyte, who extensively investigated patterns of co-presence and suggested the importance of places to seat in successful public spaces used to say that “people seat wherever they have a place to seat”. In this paper we pretend to be a little more specific and investigate the hypothesis that “people seat wherever they have a place to see” combining direct observation with space syntax tools and techniques. The layouts of three plazas in Lisbon were analyzed and compered according to their intensity level of use and success. For each layout standing activities were mapped several times and at different times of the day. Using the software UCL Depthmap the position of the benches and other standing places were evaluated in terms of the size and properties of their isovists, visual control and controllability as well as coefficient visual of clustering. The results of these configuracional measures were compared with the data collection of behavior mapping. The study demonstrates the use of the proposed method in the evaluation of the social life of public spaces showing evidences on the relation between standing activities and benches occupancy and the importance of the fields of vision in people social behavior. The results suggest a good correlation between the syntactic measures and the user evaluation of the benches and other standing places in the plazas. The results also suggest how designers and policymakers can manipulate space in order to contribute to the urban life

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space configuration, places to seat, Isovist, panopticon space, convex space.