Citizens of Thessaloniki, Greece can bring their plastic household waste to a “zero waste lab,” use software to design their own custom recycled street furniture and watch it take form via 3D printer. The project is the latest from “Print Your City,” a creative initiative by Dutch research and design studio The New Raw that combines DIY urbanism interventions with smart use of freely available materials.

The team hopes to create circular waste streams within the city, engaging local residents in the process and enhancing public spaces at the same time. Print Your City takes municipal plastic waste, grinds it up into pellets or flakes and feeds it into 3D printers to produce street furniture that’s extremely tough and durable.

With this project, the power to shape the looks and functionality of public furniture is in the hands of the people who will be using it – a concept that could be extended to all sorts of endeavors to contribute to a more equitable world. Residents turned furniture designers can come up with virtually any shape or color they want, add features like built-in planters or bike racks and decide where their creation should be placed.

The New Raw’s initial prototype for the Thessaloniki project was a half bench, half planter that required about 100kg of plastic waste to create, noting that the average EU citizen generates about 31kg each year. A bunch of the prototypes were placed around Thessaloniki’s Nea Paralia waterfront promenade to gauge public interest and the city responded with over 3,000 user-submitted designs, some of which will begin to appear in the city’s Hanth Park this month.

“Plastic has a design failure,” says Print Your City founders Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki. “It is designed to last forever, but often we use it once and throw it away. With Print Your City, we endeavor to show a better way of using plastic in long lasting and high value applications.”

Smart, well-designed urban seating encourages more interaction with the cities we live in and with each other, infusing them with vibrancy and a sense of connection. It’s even cooler when it’s built right into a park or sidewalk as a multifunctional element to add some sculptural visual interest, delineate different zones or offer opportunities for fitness and play.

Just a Black Box: Furniture Transforms Into Kiosk

A cube of semi-private seating by day, ‘Just a Black Box’ by Max Boano and Jonas Prismontas transforms into a kiosk for commercial or public use at night (or whenever else it’s desired.) The box elevates itself on its own hidden hydraulic columns to become a customizable space that can be used for retail, cafes, bike repair, selling tickets or even as a mini theater.

3 Urban Hammock Installations

Comfy hammocks come to public spaces in various forms to create some of the most nap-worthy urban furniture you’ll ever see, including a series of nets strung over the grass by The Chartered Institute of Housing, bright blue hammocks inserted into a void in a promenade along Paprocany Lake in Poland, and re-purposed fire hoses hung from a steel grid in Copenhagen.

Vanke Cloud City by Lab D+H

Vanke Cloud City is a mixed-use development project in Guangzhou, China boasting a series of creative public seating strategies by Lab D+H. The Cloud Line is a continuous tubular steel structure offering benches, monkey bars, parallel bars and other uses, while Cloud Seat is a modular set of interacted spaces made of perforated steel plate, with vertically stacked seating.

Meeting Bowls for NYC

Small groups can get together and chat face-to-face in a comfortable, breezy space with ‘Meeting Bowls’ by the Madrid-based design firm mmmm… in partnership with the Times Square Alliance. The urban furniture installation was situated in the center of Manhattan’s busiest plaza in summer 2011to facilitate interactions and dialogue between friends and strangers alike. The base of each bowl gently rocks to imitate the sensation of floating.

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The City Is Your Living Room 15 Modern Street Furniture Designs

In the asphalt-covered space that would normally be occupied by a single vehicle could be a bike rack, a dance floor, an outdoor cafe, a kiddie pool or a beautifully landscaped public park. Sometimes guerrilla and sometimes officially city-sanctioned, these 15 projects occupy urban parking spots for uses that are undoubtedly a lot more fun.

Bike Parking = Superior Efficiency

Ten bicycles can easily fit within a single parking spot, and many cities have started to take advantage of this fact with specially-sized bike racks. Buenos Aires installed a few car-shaped racks in parking spots throughout the city, an idea that caught the attention of Washington DC’s transit authority, and San Francisco’s 40th street parklet (seen top) was created by adjacent business Manifesto & Subrosa. They’re also occasionally unsanctioned, with citizens taking it upon themselves to occupy a spot with bikes for a day.

Car-Shaped Tents for Urban Camping

Designer Michael Rakowitz created a car-shaped tent made just for parking spaces, making it possible to camp in urban locations while (kind of) blending in. A similar tent used a car-shaped frame and a standard car cover for an even more convincing effect, offering affordable housing virtually anywhere in the city.

Sao Paulo’s Permanent Parklets

The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil has some of the world’s prettiest and most colorful parklets, which are parking spots transformed into mini public parks. While many parklets are temporary, this one is permanent, with the spot fully paved and heavy-duty urban furniture in a bright shade of red.

Noriega Street Parklet, San Francisco

Diagonal wooden benches with built-in greenery take up three parking spots in San Francisco in this design by Matarozzi Pelsinger Design + Build. The seating was designed around the awkward shape of the available space, and the rule that it had to be at least three feet away from adjacent parking spots. Says the firm, “The acute corners are embraced as areas for planting and “chaise lounge” seating, where tight plan geometry becomes an excuse to put your feet up.”

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Occupy Parking Spots 15 Projects Reclaiming The Streets

Packing down nearly as flat as they were before they were modified, six interlocking structures made of pallets unfold to reveal a variety of seating options with greenery poking out of the bench backs. Johannesburg artist r1 was asked to develop the public seating as part of a residence program in the city aiming to enliven public space and come up with innovative ways to contribute to the community.

All six units can be combined into one larger structure, grouped together in smaller configurations or used alone. Each one contains two fold-down benches that can be used back-to-back, side-to-side or on a diagonal.

Made of discarded pallets, each one is on wheels so it can be moved quickly and easily. In addition to providing comfortable places for locals to congregate, the seats bring a little greenery into the urban environment.

Other unconventional iterations of urban furniture have included UFO-inspired loungers, ‘stair squares’ and even seats that require strangers to interact with each other.

Three designers sneak around Paris, quickly installing brightly-colored machine-fabricated objects onto public chairs, phones, vending machines and other urban surfaces to make them more convenient to city residents. They call it ‘Fabrique-Hacktion,’ taking extra steps beyond what city officials are willing to fund with tax dollars to create a more comfortable and welcoming place to live.

Little slides shoot coins out of the receptacles in vending machines to make them easier to retrieve. Coat hooks hang helpfully from rock walls near bus stops. Tension bands hold newspapers against the wall of the subway, offering them to each new rider in turn.

Highly recognizable in bright shades of orange, blue and green, these thoughtful conveniences even go so far as hand-crank phone chargers and reflectors on top of the red and green lights of metro ticketing machines so users can tell from far away which machines are working and which aren’t.

Beyond just installing these items themselves, the designers offer up an explanatory video, manual and all construction plans and files for download on their website so anyone can take the project to their own city.