Library as the Third Place
The Great Good Place:
Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg
Marlowe & Company, 1999
Ray Oldenburg identifies third places, or “great good places,” as the public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), third places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them. Third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Oldenburg suggests that beer gardens, main streets, pubs, cafés, coffeehouses, post offices, and other third places are the heart of a community’s social vitality and the foundation of a functioning democracy. They promote social equality by leveling the status of guests, provide a setting for grassroots politics, create habits of public association, and offer psychological support to individuals and communities.
An Invitation from the author
In the 1950s, our think tanks were predicting that, due to the rapid development of labor saving devices, we’d soon have so much leisure time we wouldn’t know what to do with it. Those experts weren’t aware of how greatly life styles could be manipulated in a hard-driving consumer society. Two thirds of our economy came to depend upon consumer spending and much has been done to maximize it.
To the post World War I strategy of the “family wage” allowing for the purchase and equipping of single family dwellings, post World War II planning added restrictive zoning which spread our daily destinations over a wide landscape. It’s as though State Farm and General Motors were in charge of urban development. That hour after work, once given to socializing with friends, is now spent in commuter traffic. Residential neighborhoods are purged of the necessities of daily life. We have to get in our cars for everything.
Confinement of all commercial establishments to strips, malls and downtowns robbed most Americans of community. The local independent taverns, drug stores, bakeries, candy stores, barber shops, beauty parlors, and restaurants that formerly hosted daily socializing were forbidden in the new neighborhoods. The way was paved for the corporate colonization of the public realm. Old hangouts were replaced by chains offering high volume, fast turnover, and depersonalized service.
My effort to combat the dehumanizing aspects of urban development in the United States was to offer the concept of the “third place” and its vital functions in promoting healthy individuals and a vital democratic society. Third places are simply informal public gathering places the character of which is established by local and loyal “‘regulars” who make them enjoyable and elevating places to visit. Since I began this work, it has been heartening to watch so many people and so many institutions scramble to restore an informal public life in America.
— Ray Oldenburg, Pensacola, FL
Quotes from The Great Good Place
“In the absence of informal public life, living becomes more expensive. Where the means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.”
“What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably — a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”
“Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’”
“The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.”
“Life without community has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community. It is no coincidence that the ‘helping professions’ became a major industry in the United States as suburban planning helped destroy local public life and the community support it once lent.”
“Totally unlike Main Street, the shopping mall is populated by strangers. As people circulate about in the constant, monotonous flow of mall pedestrian traffic, their eyes do not cast about for familiar faces, for the chance of seeing one is small. That is not part of what one expects there. The reason is simple. The mall is centrally located to serve the multitudes from a number of outlying developments within its region. There is little acquaintance between these developments and not much more within them. Most of them lack focal points or core settings and, as a result, people are not widely known to one another, even in their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhood is only a minority portion of the mall’s clientele.”
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