Flexibility is what separates today’s successful spaces from unsuccessful ones. For example, a not-for-profit organisation in New York turned Bryant Park, a once-derelict but charming garden in front of the city’s public library, into a hybrid-space popular with office workers. The park’s manager noticed that a lot of visitors were using mobile phones and laptops there, so they installed Wi-Fi and added some chairs and desks. The idea was not to distract people from the flowers but to let them use their little bit of park as their very fit.
The academic name for such spaces is ‘third places’, a term coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989. Oldenburg wanted to distinguish between the sociological functions of people’s first places where they live, their second places where they work and the other public spaces that serve them as safe, neutral and informal meeting points which would encourage conversation. As Oldenburg saw it, a good third place makes admission free or cheap—the price of a cup of coffee, say—offers creature comforts, and draws a group of regulars. He felt that most people, especially in suburban areas, were moving only between first and second places. Society, Oldenburg feared, was at risk of coming unstuck in these areas without third place venues for spreading ideas and forming bonds.
But, do the oasis-like internet cafés for urban nomads play the role that Oldenburg envisioned? James Katz of Rutgers University warns that these cafés are often full of people with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones and hacking away at their laptop keyboards. They are more engaged with their email inbox than with the people touching their elbows. These places are ‘physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated’, says Katz, which leaves people feeling ‘more isolated than they would be if the café were merely empty’. Many cafés are trying to deal with this problem by, for example, hosting special events such as live jazz and poetry readings and actually turning off their internet connections at this time so that people mingle more. Clearly the new oases and the urban nomads who spawned them are still evolving.
Questions
1. The features found in the remodeled Bryant Park in New York
2. As originally defined by Oldenburg, third places
3. Oldenburg believes that suburbs lacking third places
4. Katz believes that people interacting only with inanimate objects