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As I have been working on the book I have been observing spaces and the way we interact in them. It’s interesting to me to watch people at a coffee shop. Once you enter, things change. It’s like we all have adopted a new reality of how to interact in this place and it’s understood. I am looking for a word to describe what happens to people but can’t find one yet. What they do is start to take walls down. Walls that normally would not allow them to talk with people are gone and there is almost a mini community that is created. We all share the same space for a while and that brings us together. But it wasn’t always that way. Less than 10 years ago we did not have the same category of place in our every day lives. Yeah there were barber shops and morning breakfast joints but in my experience they were more like clubs where you had to belong and then you were welcome to kick back and take off your guard.
I see cities evolving into places where we always are at the “coffee shop”, no matter if we are on the street or in the park we will begin to understand more places in our lives as safe places to take down our guard and make a new friend. Consider this bookshelf in Bonn, Germany (pictured above). In order for this to work there had to be adopted a new set of unspoken rules of conduct to make this work right. What I wonder is what it takes to take a place and put a new social reality in place.
Levi
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jason // Sep 17, 2008 at 11:41 am
Good point and I think the bookshelf would be an excellent experiment. I read that very same article from the Dwell blog… I think you should try it at Good and see if people will accept the “rules of conduct”.
The honor driven bookshelf works in Central Park - how about West Sac?
2 Micah // Sep 17, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I don’t know if I agree that these places are just being created. Maybe I don’t feel that the coffee shop is actually that free of walls. Really when I go to sit and work or read the paper I don’t normally want to just have people pull up a chair and start talking to me. At the park with the kids though, I do like to strike up conversations, and that definitely feels more like a public living room to me. People have done this at parks as long as there have been parks I would venture. To be honest some indy coffee shops definitely feel like they are a club. Like if you don’t have the same number of tattoos or piercings you really should go to Starbucks, kind of attitude.
I really want you to elaborate on why you think there is a new paradigm in these coffee shops because I think you are hitting on something that happens more at a downtown independent shop than at the Starbucks next to the Jamba, next to the Jiffy Lube next to the . . . .
3 wburg // Sep 18, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I’d take issue with your timetable. As someone who was spending a lot of time in coffee shops in this manner 20 years ago, “less than 10 years ago” seems inaccurate. Even then, I was late to the game: Java City opened in the mid-eighties, Weatherstone was open long before that. So far as I can tell the original Sacramento coffee shop was a beatnik hangout called “The Iron Sandal” on Broadway that was around in the 1950s. And, of course, that was inspired by Beat Generation coffee hangouts in San Francisco and New York, which were in turn inspired by European cafes.
If you really want to follow it all the way back, it leads to the Greeks and their tradition of an “agora” or open marketplace. This was more than just a trading center, it was also a place where any schmuck with a big mouth and something to say could stand up and shout about his ideas in public (hmmm…sounds kinda like a blog!)
Over time, the role of the agora changed, and as the Greek “polis” gave way to the Roman imperial city, the agora became the “forum,” with the same traditions, just a lot bigger, and as Rome fell so did much public space (and public discourse)–at least until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which is where those European cafes got their start.
So maybe we’re coming full circle yet again, and our nation of Agora-phobes are starting to get the idea that it’s okay to have a place where people can just get together and talk about ideas.
4 Greg // Sep 19, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I think we just need to put up a shelf in one of our parks and see what happens
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