Ray Oldenburg

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pages: 215 words: 71,155

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

—Booklist “A book that should be read by everyone in North America over the age of 16.” —The World of Beer “ ‘The Great Good Place’ by Ray Oldenburg is a treatise on the ‘third places’ in our lives . . . he makes so much sense. He describes ways to gather back our sense of community.” —The Virginian-Pilot “In his book, Oldenburg . . . captures the essence of a true coffeehouse based on the sidewalk cafes of Paris, English pubs, Viennese coffeehouses, German bier gartens, Japanese teahouses and America’s main street.” —Specialty Coffee Retailer Magazine RAY OLDENBURG Celebrating the Third Place Ray Oldenburg, Ph.D., professor emeritus of sociology at the University of West Florida, coined the term “third place” and is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading advocates for great good places.

He is frequently sought after as a media commentator and consultant to entrepreneurs and community and urban planners. He lives in Pensacola, Florida. EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RAY OLDENBURG Celebrating the Third Place Inspiring Stories About the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities MARLOWE & COMPANY NEW YORK CELEBRATING THE THIRD PLACE: Inspiring Stories About the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities Copyright © 2001 by Ray Oldenburg Published by Marlowe & Company An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

What lures customers to Annie’s when competitors like Agway and Wal-Mart are within five minutes’ drive? Established independent garden centers are equally close, and specialty growers are ten minutes away. Just as you might ask, What’s special about a Fred’s hot dog, you might also ask, What’s special about Annie’s? Ray Oldenburg, in his book The Great Good Place, describes characteristics of places like Fred’s and Annie’s. They are on neutral ground, welcome all people, are accessible, modest, and playful. Customers develop a sense of ownership for the places, feel restored, at ease and rooted there, and regulars talk freely about their lives, their community, and the world.


The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg

bread and circuses, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, feminist movement, fixed income, global village, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, New Urbanism, place-making, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, wage slave, young professional

Acclaim for Ray Oldenburg and The Great Good Place “Ray Oldenburg is inspirational. He is the first to recognize and articulate the importance of the greeting place (third place) for the well-being of the individual and society at large.” —Ron Sher, President, Terranomics Development and founder, Third Place Books, Seattle, Washington “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t refer to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place. At a time when all great, good independent bookstores everywhere are under siege, we’re fortunate that Mr. Oldenburg has articulated our message so clearly.” —Mitchell Kaplan, owner, Books & Books, Miami, Florida “The Great Good Place has put into words and focus what I’ve been doing all my life, from the barbershop I remember as a child to the bookstore I now own.

., proprietor Lynne Breaux carries on a tradition of hospitality begun in 1796, when William Tunnicliff opened the Eastern Branch Hotel. “Tunnicliff’s is a great, good place,” Breaux says. “It is where politicians, poets, and people of all ages, occupations and cultures converse and celebrate.” Pictured here is a recent weekend celebration. Photo © Ray Oldenburg Author Ray Oldenburg (center) at his own local great good place. In 1996, Tracy and Steve Spracklen opened their Good Neighbor Coffee Shop in Pensacola, Florida, not knowing that the author of The Great Good Place, a book that had inspired them, lived in town. Here is the author at the Good Neighbor Coffee Shop having his weekly “Coffee with the Cops.”

—Mitchell Kaplan, owner, Books & Books, Miami, Florida “The Great Good Place has put into words and focus what I’ve been doing all my life, from the barbershop I remember as a child to the bookstore I now own. My goal at Horizon Books is to provide that third place in which people can “hang out.” Ray Oldenburg has defined those good places while still recognizing the magical chemistry they require. The Great Good Place is a book to read, to recommend, and to quote.” —Victor W. Herman, owner, Horizon Books, with locations in Traverse City, Petoskey, and Cadillac, Michigan “The great value of this book is that Mr. Oldenburg has given us an insightful and extremely useful new lens through which to look at a familiar problem. . .”


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

The perfect catchphrase for the coffee-house’s vital social function happened to be languishing in disuse, just waiting for someone to seize on it. When Harry Roberts found himself struggling to put the communal appeal of Starbucks into words, he shared his trouble with his wife, who soon stumbled across the solution in a bookstore: an out-of-print book called The Great Good Place, by a sociology professor named Ray Oldenburg. In his book, Oldenburg describes America’s need for the neutral, safe, public gathering spots that had gradually disappeared; he calls this nexus the “third place,” with home and work being places one and two. His words were eerily prescient — he even pointed out that third places generally revolve around beverages, like with tea-houses and pubs.

His words were eerily prescient — he even pointed out that third places generally revolve around beverages, like with tea-houses and pubs. As Schultz might have said, the synergy was too good to be true. The company now had its philanthropic rallying cry: it wasn’t a coffee company, but a third place bringing people together through the social glue of coffee. And who could disagree? Well, Ray Oldenburg, for one. Now retired, Oldenburg is grateful for the renewed attention that Starbucks brought to his third-place idea, but he remains displeased that the company co-opted his concept. “It was a little tacky of them not to consult me,” he told me. * Oldenburg’s idea of a third place was actually of a calmer, mom-and-pop establishment without Starbucks’s high volume and fast turnover.

A sparkling Starbucks store can also make a historically bleak place seem that much more livable — to the point where real estate agents in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, include the distance to a new Starbucks in their home listings. Arthur Rubinfeld boasted to me of having received stacks of letters from thankful homeowners who credit a nearby Starbucks with boosting long-stagnant property values. Even Ray Oldenburg, the father of the “third place” idea who later refused to endorse the chain, offered surprising praise for Starbucks’s ability to help revitalize a depressed town. “To their credit, they brought Naperville [Illinois] back to life single-handedly, and now it’s one of the five most livable cities in the country,” he said.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

Georgetown University Press. pp. 119–132. idea of a third place: Matthew Dollinger. June 11, 2008. “Starbucks, ‘The Third Place,’ and Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience.” Fast Company. www.fastcompany.com/887990/starbucks-third-place-and-creating-ultimate-customer-experience. What Ray Oldenburg: Ray Oldenburg. 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. Paragon House. Examples include pubs: Leo W. Jeffres, Cheryl C. Bracken, Guowei Jian, and Mary F. Casey. 2009. “The Impact of Third Places on Community Quality of Life.”

But to send someone a message, you need to find them first, and for that, you need some sort of shared space that several people can drop in on. The idea of a third place is often invoked to explain the appeal of Starbucks: the first place is home, the second place is work, but people also need a third place to socialize that’s neither home nor work, like a coffeeshop. What Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term in a 1989 book called The Great Good Place, had in mind was something more specific than just any convenient spot where you might stop by for a cup of joe. Oldenburg’s third places are first of all social centers, distinguished by an emphasis on conversation and playfulness, regular attendees who set the tone for newcomers, the freedom to come and go as you please, a lack of formal membership requirements, and a warm, unpretentious feeling of home away from home.

The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/cameras-with-constraints/494291/. Ian Bogost. May 3, 2018. “Why ‘Stories’ Took Over Your Smartphone.” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/smartphone-stories-snapchat-instagram-facebook/559517/. “Third place conversation”: Ray Oldenburg. 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. Paragon House. Popular email lists: (No author cited.) January 7, 2000. “Mailing List History.” Living Internet. www.livinginternet.com/l/li.htm.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third spaces,” places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they’ve purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of businesses because they want to generate income. But in the process, as close observers of the city such as Jane Jacobs and the Yale ethnographer Elijah Anderson have discovered, they help produce the material foundations for social life.

The variation suggests that gentrification plays out differently depending on the local context, and also that groups are likely to be affected by gentrification in divergent ways. In all neighborhoods, though, commercial establishments are important parts of the social infrastructure. As Jane Jacobs and Ray Oldenburg famously argued, grocery stores, diners, cafés, bookstores, and barbershops draw people out of their homes and into the streets and sidewalks, where they create cultural vitality and contribute to the passive surveillance of shared public space. When I did research in Chicago, I discovered that poor neighborhoods with active retail corridors were surprisingly resilient during the devastating heat wave, because people who lived in them could easily go out and get air-conditioning or support from neighbors.

largest and most heterogeneous public space: Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum, International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). “participator rather than spectator”: MassObservation, The Pub and the People (1943; repr., London: Cresset Library, 1987), 17. people in public can feel like they’re at home: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1989). the air that pedestrians breathe a little cleaner: See Vanessa Quirk, “The 4 Coolest ‘High Line’ Inspired Projects,” ArchDaily, July 16, 2012, https://www.archdaily.com/​254447/​the-4-coolest-high-line-inspired-projects.


pages: 230 words: 62,294

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

Now that they are older, some find that bars are too noisy and raucous and threatening for companionship. So they hang out in cafés and coffee bars. The music is quiet enough to allow conversation. The places are well-lit. No one is carded, and no one is drunk.4 Schultz makes much of the “Third Place,” a term coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe the non-home, non-work environment that had once been the forum for public life but that had almost disappeared under the postwar regime of highly regimented schedules, commuter life, and television. This had clearly been the role of the old coffeehouses in Europe and had been present in America in the form of neighborhood gathering places such as bars and coffee shops.

Slywotzky and Kevin Mundt, “Hold the Sugar; Starbucks Corp.’s Business Success,” Across the Board, September 1996, 39. 2 Specialty Coffee Association of America and National Coffee Association, personal interviews, October 2005. 3 Information Resources, Inc., 2004. 4 Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 120–21. 5 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 296. 6 Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report (New York: HarperBusiness, 1992), 39–40. 7 Unscrupulous blending has also had a hand in this travesty—mixing a little genuine Kona into a Central American blend and calling it “Kona” or “Kona Blend.” 8 The growth of the specialty coffee industry has also helped cultivate a rising demand for specialty teas, which, like coffees, focus on distinguishing themselves based on origin, cultivation, processing, and blending techniques.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995); David G. Myers, “Close Relationships and Quality of Life,” in Well-being, ed. Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz. 8. For more about the characteristics of “third places,” see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon, 1989); Ray Oldenburg, Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities (New York: Marlowe, 2000). Thanks are due to my brother Steve for introducing me to the term meatspace. 9.

Principle 1 Live in a community where you know and talk to your neighbors. Making Tradeoffs The digital revolution, like the automotive revolution that preceded it, has enhanced society in countless ways. But it has also had unintended consequences. Many of the hangouts where people used to meet (which sociologist Ray Oldenburg called third places and techies call meatspaces) are disappearing.8 And given the impact of less social contact on people’s health and morale, not to mention on the bottom line, it’s no wonder that employers such as Yahoo and Bank of America are calling their remote workers back to the office.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

On the same basement level as the video store is Anthony’s Italian Kitchen, another good local hangout, and Bull Moose Music, where many residents make weekly pilgrimages to check out new releases and flip through the bins of newly arrived used CDs. Upstairs is Casco Bay Books, a bookstore café that is a favorite place to lounge, and, across the hall, Casablanca Comics, which serves as a second home to a crowd of comic book aficionados. This cluster of local businesses constitutes what sociologist Ray Oldenburg has dubbed a “third place”—a place where people can put aside the concerns of home and work (the first and second places) and find good company and lively conversation among their neighbors. Third places are the bars, coƒeehouses, bookstores, and barber shops at the heart of a community’s informal public life, its social vitality and democratic spirit.

Chuck D’Aprix contributed valuable research to the final chapter. Like all books, this one is built on the work of many other writers, including Joanna Blythman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Liza Featherstone, Thom Hartmann, Jane Jacobs, Marjorie Kelly, David Korten, James Howard Kunstler, Greg LeRoy, David Morris, Al Norman, Ray Oldenburg, Eric Schlosser, E. F. Schumacher, and Michael Shuman. I want to thank David Korten, who first suggested I write this book. My agent, Anna Ghosh, was wonderfully enthusiastic about this project and found a great home for it in Beacon Press, which has been independently publishing books for more than 150 years.

Jack Gold, interview, Oct. 4, 2005; John McGettrick, cochair of the Red Hook Civic Association, interview, Sept. 18, 2005; Margaret Foster, “To Clear Site for Home Depot, Owner Illegally Demolishes Nashville House,” Preservation Magazine, Oct. 5, 2005. 27. Store counts from Starbucks.com; Brad Wong, “Great Wall Breached: Starbucks Sets Up Shop,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 22, 2005. 28. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coƒee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of Community, 2nd ed. (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999). 29. Ibid., 21–85; 70. 30. Hollie Lund, “Testing the Claims of New Urbanism: Local Access, Pedestrian Travel, and Neighboring Behaviors,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Sept. 22, 2003, 414–29. 31.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

Will Disney hire extras to play the roles of other suburbanites who can’t drive—elderly, disabled, and low-income residents, peeking out from behind living-room curtains? BOWLING ALONE Where can America’s stranded nondrivers go, in today’s world? There’s no colorful cafô down the block, or bowling alley or tavern, where neighbors can “be apart together, and mutually withdraw from the world,” in the words of writer Ray Oldenburg.1 Such “great good places” or “third places,” that are apart from both home and work environments, are now often illegal—violations of zoning codes. The truth is, the term “community life” is perceived as archaic in a world so dominated by business and government. “We’ve mutated from citizens to consumers in the last sixty years,” says James Kuntsler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere.

Alex Molnar in discussion with John de Graaf, April 1996. 13. Interview with psychologist David Elkind, October 1993. 14. David Korten, The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism (San Francisco: Kumarian/Berrett-Koehler, 2000), 33. 15. Jennifer Gailus in discussion with John de Graaf, May 1996. CHAPTER 8 1. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Paragon House, 1989), xv. 2. James Kuntsler in discussion with David Wann, March 1997. 3. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 49. 4.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

Livingston, Philip Livingston, and William Walton on its membership rolls. Early social libraries were a space apart from both work and home—semiprivate, membership-only institutions that one historian says served as “a place to converse as well as read, to debate publicly as well as study quietly.”66 These voluntary societies were “third places,” Ray Oldenburg’s phrase for “a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”67 In the eighteenth century, third places validated the sophisticated tastes of their upper-class patrons and preserved their exclusivity by recruiting members through friendship and family networks.

Adam Arenson, “Libraries in Public Before the Age of Public Libraries: Interpreting the Furnishings and Design of Athenaeums and Other ‘Social Libraries,’ 1800–1860,” 41, in The Library as Place: History, Community, and Culture, ed. John E. Buschman and Gloria J. Leckie (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2006). 67. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 16. 68. Laura Lewison, “Lawn Bowling,” 724, in Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City; Steven A. Reiss, “Horse Racing,” 611–12, in Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City; Austin Baxter Keep, History of the New York Society Library (New York: De Vinne, 1908), 123–78; Walter Friedman, “Scots,” 1160–61, in Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 172–75, 248; New York Gazette (Weyman’s), February 23, 1761, June 6, 1763, November 28, 1763; New York Mercury, May 5, 1755; and Singleton, Social New York, 40–45. 69.

., 1888), 24–27; Officers, Members, Constitution and By-Laws of the Union Club, 96–98; Porzelt, Metropolitan Club, 57–104; New York Times, February 12, 1886, February 13, 1890, September 6, 1891, February 25, 1894, May 9, 1897; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), xxiii–xxxv; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of the Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–19, 43; and Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1st ed. (New York: Paragon, 1989), 16. 63. New York Times, June 17 and 18, 1924, March 4, 1928, October 8, 1949; Harper S. Mott Diary, 1886, entries for May 3 and 5, 1886, Library of the New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

By seeking out “third places”—locations where people gather and often end up talking about things that are important to them—journalists can find other voices, hear different stories, and perhaps learn more about people from diverse backgrounds and what they are actually thinking and experiencing.42 According to sociologist Ray Oldenburg, the term third place describes “a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”43 If the first place is the home, and the second place is the work setting, then the third place includes churches, community centers, cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, and other spots where people gather informally.

id=97 (accessed July 3, 2004). 40. Richard Harwood, “Framing a Story: What’s It Really About?” Pew Center for Civic Journalism, 2004, http://www.pewcenter.org/doingcj/videos/framing.html (accessed July 3, 2004). 41. Smith, “Developing New Reflexes in Framing Stories.” 42. “Finding Third Places.” 43. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1999), 16. 44. “The State of the News Media 2004,” Committee of Concerned Journalists, http://www.journalism.org (accessed June 17, 2004). 45. Mantsios, “Media Magic,” 108. 9781442202238.print.indb 262 2/10/11 10:47 AM Notes to Pages 228–229 263 46.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Participating in a virtual community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a comfort, and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl. I've changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the sense of place is still as strong as ever. As Ray Oldenburg proposed in The Great Good Place, there are three essential places in people's lives : the place we live, the place we work, and the place we gather for conviviality. Although the casual conversation that takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs, and town squares is universally considered to be trivial, idle talk, Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where communities can come into being and continue to hold together.

One premise behind going to the trouble of adding a video channel to group communication is that it can stimulate the kind of informal, serendipitous conversation that takes place in the hallway or at the coffee machine, but in such a way that the informal space extends to wherever your colleagues are located. In a sense, they are trying to synthesize what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls "informal public spaces." Another recent Xerox experiment linked a wall-sized monitor in a common room in the Palo Alto laboratory with a common room in a sister laboratory in Oregon. People in Oregon could walk down the hall in the material world, notice on the monitor that you are in the California half of the common room, and engage you in conversation.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Think of the corner shops in Victorian England, whose practice of providing goods on credit to locals served as a lifeline for many between paydays.23 Or how, since the turn of the nineteenth century, barber shops have provided sanctuary for many African Americans, serving as places not only to get haircuts but also community spaces where men gather to play chess and dominoes, whilst also discussing politics and local affairs.24 Some local businesses even become what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called, in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, ‘third places’: neither home, nor work, but rather gathering spaces abuzz with conversation where regulars meet up and people of different social and economic backgrounds interact, form bonds, exchange ideas and share opinions. These are places where, as Oldenburg wrote, ‘we all feel at home and comfortable’.25 They play critical roles in maintaining our social fabric because they are places where we can practise community and democracy, in their most inclusive form – places where, as in a book club, people may bring wildly different world views and lived experiences that must be reconciled, calibrated, understood and discussed in order for the space to thrive.

See for example Randall Collins, ‘Interaction Rituals and the New Electronic Media’, The Sociological Eye, 25 January 2015, https://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2011/01/interaction-rituals-and-new-electronic.html. 23 Charles Walter Masters, The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers: A Case Study of York, 1867–1914 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). 24 National Museum of African American History & Culture, ‘The Community Roles of the Barber Shop and Beauty Salon,’ 2019, https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/community-roles-barber-shop-and-beauty-salon. 25 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Da Capo Press, 1999), p.22. Note that the ‘universal’ accessibility of such ‘third places’ is itself an idealistic assumption that does not necessarily take into account barriers that have been widely exposed since Oldenburg first wrote, such as the racism that has routinely rendered these same ‘third places’ uncomfortable and/or inaccessible to people of colour.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

What strategies are designers using to retrofit these ubiquitous and generic properties into place-specific amenities with community-building potential? Figure 4–1 The conversion of rural to urban land: a sample from Gwinnett County, Georgia, between 1930 and 2000. THIRD PLACES IN SUBURBIA? What is a great, good place? Sociologist Ray Oldenburg uses this term to describe neighborhood gathering places where local people routinely hang out and socialize.1 Common examples include the corner pub, diner, coffee shop, barbershop or hair salon, and even at times the hardware or general store. Oldenburg argues that as hosts to informal clubs where social bonds and networks are reinforced, these places serve a fundamental role in building community.

Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 104–1 18. 18 See Renee Chow, Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 19 Brenda Case Scheer, “The Anatomy of Sprawl,” Places 14:2 (Fall 2001): 28–37. 20 HNTB with Economic Research Associates. 21 Denise Rose, interview. 22 Anne Moudon and Paul Hess, “Suburban Clusters: The Nucleation of Multifamily Housing in Suburban Areas of the Central Puget Sound,” Journal of the American Planning Association 66, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 243–264; observations in Levittown by June Williamson, October 8, 2004. 23 Whyte, The Organization Man. 24 Observations in Park Forest by June Williamson, June 24, 2004. 25 Geoff Mulvihill, “New Numbers: International Migration Is Driving Growth in NJ,” Associated Press, April 9, 2004. 26 James Barron, “A Classic Suburb Feels Graying Pains,” New York Times, July 21, 1983. 27 The award is from the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment. The library’s architect is Croxton Collaborative of New York, experts in green building. 28 Linda Saslow, “Nation’s ‘First Suburb’ Aims to Be Most ’Green.’” Chapter 4 1 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Marlowe, 1997), and Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of our Communities (New York: Marlowe, 2001). 2 Other sociologists have begun correlating the significance of third places with higher rates of civic engagement and positive socioeconomic outcomes, arguing that local differentiations between places factor more than ever in a global capitalist system.


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Indeed, Schultz appeared to be a master image builder. As he himself has said, “My story is as much one of perseverance and drive as it is of talent and luck. I willed it to happen. I took my life in my hands, learned from anyone I could, grabbed what opportunity I could, and molded my success step by step.” In 1989 the sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great, Good Place, a lament over the passing of community meeting places like the old country store or soda fountain. The book contained an entire chapter on coffeehouses, concluding: “The survival of the coffeehouse depends upon its ability to meet present day needs and not those of a romanticized past.”

Kindleberger; The Boston Tea Party (1964), by Benjamin Woods Labaree; The Fifties (1977), by Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak; The New Winter Soldiers (1996), by Richard R. Moser; The Sugar Trust (1964), by Jack Simpson Mullins; Fighting Liberal (1945), by George W. Norris; The Great Good Place (1989), by Ray Oldenburg; The Early English Coffee House (1893), by Edward Robinson; We Say No to Your War (1994), by Jeff Richard Schutts; Hard Times (1970), by Studs Terkel; History and Reminiscences of Lower Wall Street and Vicinity (1914), by Abram Wakeman; The Life of Billy Yank (1952), by Bell Irvin Wiley. On shade-grown coffee and migratory birds: Birds Over Troubled Waters (1991), by Russell Greenbeg and Susan Lumpkin; Proceedings, Memorias: 1st Sustainable Coffee Congress (1997), edited by Robert A.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Erik Hurst, Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer, Ryan Gravel, Cathy Woolard, Tom Cousins, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Craig Jelinek, Bernie Glassman, Juliet Ellis, Freelancers Union, Paul Rice, Charles Montgomery, Jacob Wood & William McNulty, Jennifer Pahlka, Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Stewart, Indra Nooyi, Ryan Howard, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Steve Ells, Ray Oldenburg, Vivek Kundra, Tony Hsieh, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, John Tolva, Rob Spiro and Alon Salant, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler, Perry Chen, Meg Garlinghouse, Mitchell Baker, Dr. Tom X. Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr.


pages: 282 words: 69,481

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Free parking, on the other hand, is not taxed.22 An IRS rule that assigned an income value to what is now free parking would help encourage commuters to switch to noncar travel.The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. —Jim Kunstler The most important task of the urbanist is controlling size. —David Mohney As sociology professor and planning consultant Ray Oldenburg points out in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, segregation, isolation, compartmentalization, and sterilization seem to be today’s guiding principles for community growth and renewal.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Optimists believe that, in contrast to the echo chambers of current social media platforms, the metaverse offers greater scope for bringing society together, thanks to its ability to forge connections across multiple contexts. People with starkly opposing political views, or from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, can find common ground in their shared enjoyment of the same video games or music, for instance. In this way, the metaverse may help to develop what sociologist Ray Oldenburg described as ‘third places’ – contexts outside of home and work – that bring people from different worlds together in a common community life.29 And, unlike the real world, space in the metaverse is infinite. Imagining life in the metaverse takes us squarely into the realm of science fiction.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

For the first time, people began talking explicitly about the court of “public opinion”; they began to seek “publicity” for their work or ideas, a word that originates with the French publicité. Habermas argued that the political and intellectual revolutions of the eighteenth century had been facilitated by the creation of this new public sphere, largely housed in semipublic gathering places like taverns and pubs. (A few decades after Habermas, the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg would develop a similar thesis in a book called The Great Good Place—coining the now-common expression “the third place” for these venues.) For Habermas, the public sphere had a profoundly egalitarian bias, creating “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing equality of status, disregarded status altogether.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

And hopefully, we’ll figure out the new principles of social interface design. It’s going to be fascinating . . . as fun as user interface design was in the 1980s . . . so stay tuned. sixteen BUILDING COMMUNITIES WITH SOFTWARE Monday, March 3, 2003 In his book, The Great Good Place (Da Capo Press, 1999), social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools, and apartments.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

., “Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline.” 216driverless city buses underway in Edinburgh: “Edinburgh, UK,” Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, accessed September 10, 2019, https://avsincities.bloomberg.org/global-atlas/europe/uk/edinburgh-uk. 216riders a high-tech experience: “Nobina and Scania Pioneer Full Length Autonomous Buses in Sweden,” Nobina, February 20, 2019, https://www.nobina.com/en/press/archive/nobina-and-scania-pioneer-full-length-autonomous-buses-in-sweden/. 216feature single-passenger self-driving pods: “Toyota Partnership to Pilot Autonomous Vehicle Transportation System,” Nikkei Asian Review, October 8, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Toyota-partnership-to-pilot-autonomous-vehicle-transportation-system. 216Combine Jelbi with a road-pricing platform: David Zipper, “Bikeshare, Scooters, Cars, Trains, Bridges: One Agency to Rule Them All,” CityLab, November 30, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/11/transit-city-department-scootershare-ridehail-bikeshare/576982/. 217“the presence of an operator ensures”: “Principles for the Transit Workforce in Automated Vehicle Legislation and Regulation,” Transport Trades Department, March 11, 2019, https://ttd.org/policy/principles-for-the-transit-workforce-in-automated-vehicle-legislation-and-regulations/. 217“third space”: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 20. 217“a half-dozen startups are testing”: Aarian Marshall, “Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready to Do Business in Texas,” Wired, August 6, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-trucks-ready-business-texas/. 217encouraging night delivery: Haag and Hu, “1.5 Million Packages a Day.” 217how much freight moves: Alain Bertaud, Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Boston: MIT University Press, 2018), 30. 218road traffic in the developed world: Bertaud, Order without Design, 30. 218number of store trips they take by as much as half: Joann Muller, “One Big Thing: The Rise of Driverless Delivery,” Axios, November 28, 2018, https://www.axios.com/autonomous-vehicles-could-be-used-for-deliveries-3fb12a24-3e66-4d8b-b678-a2fbb47d05cb.html. 218more online shopping could empty them: For an excellent overview of trends and interacting issues, see Joe Cortright, “Does Cyber Monday Mean Delivery Gridlock Tuesday?”


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

., Quality of Life 2000: The New Politics of Work and Community (New York: Demos, 2002), 77–118. Relevant essays in the book include Robert Liberty, "Is the American Dream Endless Sprawl?"; Philip Langdon, "New Development, Traditional Patterns"; "Growth: New Challenges and Opportunities in a New American Landscape—An Interagency Report by the Clinton/Gore Administration"; and Ray Oldenburg, "Our Vanishing 'Third Places.'" [back] 11. Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Age of Excess (New York: The Free Press, 1999), chapters 14–17. [back] 12. Carol Swain, New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).


pages: 329 words: 106,831

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

What he saw was groups of women having a raucous time, drinking, playing, and being social. The experience was totally unlike the bingo games on the Web at the time, primarily single-player affairs that made you refresh your browser each time you wanted a new bingo ball to drop. Kapulka, an avid reader and thinker, was concerned with what’s called the Third Place, which Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist, so succinctly espoused in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. Kapulka thought, “You’ve got the home, work, and this public area where you socialize, a pub, a restaurant, a bingo hall. There’s a big difference between sitting in a bar drinking by yourself and sitting at home drinking by yourself, almost like the difference between aloneness and loneliness.”


Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate raider, do well by doing good, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, job satisfaction, market design, Ray Oldenburg, shareholder value, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor, zero-sum game

In America, we are in danger of losing the kind of casual social interaction that is part of the daily routine for many Europeans. In the 1990s, coffee bars became a central component of the American social scene in part because they fulfilled the need for a nonthreatening gathering spot, a “third place” outside of work and home. Ray Oldenburg, a Florida sociology professor, wrote most eloquently of this need in his book, The Great Good Place (1989). Oldenburg’s thesis is that people need informal public places where they can gather, put aside the concerns of work and home, relax, and talk. Germany’s beer gardens, England’s pubs, and French and Viennese cafés created this outlet in people’s lives, providing a neutral ground where all are equal and conversation is the main activity.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The only impediments are the will, the time and the places to plan and launch. In addition to the commons we need places to meet up, kick back and develop the brilliant schemes that will increase our shared enjoyment of the metropolis. The city is filled with such ‘third spaces’, places supercharged to reboot the community, if only we looked harder. As sociologist Ray Oldenburg explains: the café table on the Parisian street, the English pub, the Brooklyn coffee shop where you can sit by the window for the whole day, the secondhand bookshop that offers conversation as well as the unexpected volume, the barbershop where the hours of the day are marked with banter, the candy store at the corner of Jane Jacobs’s Hudson Street, the coffee houses of seventeenth-century Amsterdam where ideas circulated like money – these informal spaces are at the heart of the community; they are the incubators and the forcing ground of society.