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 (Space Syntax) 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. One reason why these research is done is to learn how space syntax analysis is applicable to the study of public spaces and another is to make the analysis comparable with other environmental and behavior approaches like “prospect and refugee theory” and the “edge effect”. 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 layout of plaza Paiva Couceiro in Lisbon was analyzed according to space syntax methodology. 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 isovist properties and syntactic measures. The results were compared with the 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 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 within the plaza. The results also suggest how designers and policymakers can manipulate space in order to contribute to improve urban life.

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