The Great Good Place

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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

., 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. His book, The Great Good Place, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice for 1989, was reissued in 1999. 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.

To the extent of our affluence, we avoid public parks, public playgrounds, public schools, and public transportation. Awareness of these trends and of the sharp decline in the number of third places in the United States prompted me to write The Great Good Place a decade ago. That volume details, illustrates, and analyzes informal public gathering places both here and abroad. It identifies their many social functions and their unique importance as focal points of community life. Now in its third edition, The Great Good Place has become basic reading among a growing number of groups encouraging revitalization of our urban areas and of public life. That book and the publicity it received also brought me into contact with many people who own and operate third places or otherwise have intimate knowledge of them.

And I thank you Ray Oldenburg, for leading the way. REALITY Seven years and many seventy-hour weeks later, I think I am still pretty thankful to Ray for the inspiration and direction offered in his epic tome of revolutionary social theory, The Great Good Place. The truth is I was very lonely at the time myself and, as a student of social theory and frequenter of the myriad coffeehouses in Chicago, The Great Good Place simply struck a chord in my bored Gen-X heart. It spoke to me. I was inspired. So I took to the road with an accomplice and set off to the golden South, the new land of opportunity, North Carolina. Here, with the help of a partner I had only just met (and on the back porch of a rural farmhouse, to boot!)


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

Can these not also be the subject of our art and our literature? HENRY FAIRLEE But aside from friends, there must also be a Place. I suppose that this is the Great Good Place that every man carries in his heart. . . . PETE HAMILL A community life exists when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows. PHILIP SLATER George Dane: I know what I call it . . . “The Great Good Place.” The Brother: I’ve put it myself a little differently . . . “The Great Want Met.” George Dane: Ah, yes—that’s it! from “The Great Good Place” by HENRY JAMES Contents PREFACE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION INTRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PART I 1.

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.

—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. . .”


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.

Minitel's messageries in France are into their second decade of a wildly popular, national, governmentsupported, written-word chat system. Fujitsu's Habitat combines a cartoonland graphical representation of participants and their environment with a synchronous chat system. IRC is Internet's pioneering multi-user chat system. IRC is the corner pub, the caf‚, the common room--the "great good place" of the Net. Most computers connected to Internet run a program called "talk" that enables people on different host computers to communicate screen-to-screen simultaneously. If I suspect that a person I know is online at a different site, I can issue a chat request through Internet. If that person is logged in, even if the computer is on the other side of the world, my chat request will go directly to the recipient's screen for immediate attention (rather than going to an e-mailbox for later attention).

The staged conventions of the political parties to anoint politicians 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 24 de 26 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/10.html who had already been selected behind closed doors were a prominent example, but they were only part of a web of headlines, advertisements, and managed events. The replacement of old neighborhoods with modern malls, and caf‚s with fast-food franchises, was part of this "society of the spectacle," precisely because they help destroy the "great good places" where the public sphere lives. More than twenty years later, Debord looked back and emphasized this aspect of his earlier forecasts: For the agora, the general community, has gone, along with communities restricted to intermediary bodies or to independent institutions, to salons or caf‚s, or to workers in a single company.


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

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.

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.”

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. later technology such as: Lori Kendall. 2002.


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

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.

New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998. McDowell, Bill. “The Bean Counters.” Restaurants & Institutions, December 1995. McKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. National Coffee Association. Winter Drinking Survey. New York: National Coffee Association, 2005. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Peel, Carl. “Los Angeles, a Microcosm of the Country.” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal 169, no. 4 (April 1997): 16–28. Popcorn, Faith. The Popcorn Report. New York: HarperBusiness, 1992. Quinn, James P., Scientific Marketing of Coffee. New York: Tea & Coffee Trade Journal Co., 1960.


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. Desirable experiences occur in places conducive to them, Oldenburg claims, or they do not occur at all.

Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. 1990 Land Use in Northeastern Illinois Counties, Minor Civil Divisions and Chicago Community Areas. Chicago: Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, 1995. Nozzi, D. “West Palm Beach FL: Back From the Brink.” http://user.gru. net/domz/palm.htm. Accessed 28 March 2002. Oldenburg, R. The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe, 1989. “Passes Help People Hop onto the Bus.” Transportation Exchange Update, April 1994. Pederson, E. O. Transportation in Cities. New York: Pergamon, 1980. Pew Center for Civic Journalism. “Top Local Problems.” Princeton Survey Research Associates. College Park, Md. http://www.pewcenter.org/doingcj/ research/r_st2000nat1.htm1#crime.


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

., 2021, ‘Affective polarization in the digital age: testing the direction of the relationship between social media and users’ feelings for out-group parties’, New Media & Society. 26 Rathje, S., et al., 2020, ‘Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 118, No. 26. 27 Haidt, ‘Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid’. 28 Ibid. 29 Oldenburg, R., 1989, The Great Good Place (De Capo Press). 30 Cited in Meltzer, M., 2002, Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography (University of Missouri Press), p. 82. 31 Wirth, L., 1938, ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1. 32 Ibid., pp. 1 and 13. 33 Fischer, C., 1982, To Dwell Among Friends (University of Chicago Press). 34 Mumford, L., 1938, The Culture of Cities (reprint by Open Road Media, 2016, accessed online at Perlego.com). 35 Putnam, Bowling Alone. 36 Woetzel, J., et al., 2018, ‘Smart cities: digital solutions for a more livable future’, McKinsey Global Institute (mckinsey.com). 37 Yeung, P., 2022, ‘“It’s a beautiful thing”: how one Paris district rediscovered conviviality’, Guardian.

O’Sullivan, F., 2019, ‘Paris wants to grow “urban forests” at famous landmarks’, Bloomberg News. Oakes, K., 2020, ‘How cutting your food waste can help the climate’, BBC (bbc.com). OECD Data, 2021, ‘Net ODA’ (data.oecd.org). OECD, 2015, ‘The metropolitan century’ (oecd.org). Oldenburg, R., 1989, The Great Good Place (De Capo Press). Partridge, J., 2022, ‘Google in $1bn deal to buy Central Saint Giles offices in London’, Guardian. Paulas, R., 2017, ‘The death of the suburban office park and the rise of the suburban poor’, Pacific Standard Magazine. Paullin, C. and Wright J., 1932, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (reprint by Greenwood Press, 1976).


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.

Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Nowak, Martin A., and Roger Highfield. SuperCooperators: Beyond the Survival of the Fittest: Why Cooperation, Not Competition, is the Key of Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 1999). Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014). Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Quart, Alissa.

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: 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

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. [Participants] replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals.”

“Subjective Complexity, Familiarity, and Liking for Popular Music.” Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition 14:1–2 (1995): 77. Ohl, John F., and Joseph Earl Arrington. “John Maelzel, Master Showman of Automata and Panoramas.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84:1 (1960): 56–92. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Café, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers, 1989. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Poivre, Pierre. Travels of a Philosopher; Or, Observations on the Manners and Arts of Various Nations in Africa and Asia.


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.

Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); and 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). Page 75. The Staffan Linder information comes from de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. Page 76. Terry Lefton, “Schultz’s Caffeinated Crusade,” Brandweek, July 5, 1999.


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

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.

Deep Ecology, Voluntary Simplicity. Portland, Ore.: Northwest Earth Institute Discussion Courses, 1998. O’Connell, Brian. Civil Society: The Underpinnings of American Democracy. Medford, Mass.: Tufts University Press, 1999. O’Hara, Bruce. Working Harder Isn’t Working. Vancouver, BC: New Star, 1993. Oldenburg, Ray. 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. O’Neill, Jessie. The Golden Ghetto. Center City, Minn.: Hazelden, 1997. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Books, 1981. Packard, Vance.The Waste Makers.


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

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. Kyungjoon Lee et al., “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?”


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

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.

“Keeping Ahead of the Joneses.” New York Times, November 24, 2002, WK4. Ohlemacher, Stephen “With Income Tax Cuts Expiring, Rates Could Rise for Wealthy—but What about Middle Class?” Star Tribune, July 22, 2010. www.star tribune.com/lifestyle/99034509.html (accessed August 7, 2010). Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe, 1999. Olsen, Eric. “Down and Out in Santa Monica.” Blogcritics. January 6, 2003. www .blogcritics.org/archives/2003/01/06/200033.php (accessed February 22, 2004). “Organized Crime and the Labor Unions.”


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

To function as a third place, a business must be relatively modest in scale, be embedded in a neighborhood or small downtown, and provide space for loitering and casual interaction. These essential characteristics mean that third places are almost always locally owned.28 The personal and civic benefits of third places are numerous, Oldenburg COMMUNITY LIFE 93 argues in his book The Great Good Place. Third places engender a feeling of belonging that contributes to a person’s well-being. They nurture the web of connections that knit communities together, and act as “levelers” by bridging diƒerences of background and social rank. They cultivate the habit of association: those who frequently engage in casual socializing with their neighbors are more apt to start and join formal civic and community organizations, which in turn encourage greater participation in the political process.

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: 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

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

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.” Schultz loved the book and adopted Oldenburg’s academic term, christening Starbucks as a “third place” beyond home or work, “an extension of people’s front porch,” where people could gather informally.

.; Manias, Panics and Crashes (1989), by Charles P. 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.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

But in the main, we would not think of confessing our secrets to the members of our clubs. But we have come to a point at which it is near heresy to suggest that MySpace or Facebook or Second Life is not a community. I have used the word myself and argued that these environments correspond to what sociologist Ray Oldenberg called “the great good place.”8 These were the coffee shops, the parks, and the barbershops that used to be points of assembly for acquaintances and neighbors, the people who made up the landscape of life. I think I spoke too quickly. I used the word “community” for worlds of weak ties.9 Communities are constituted by physical proximity, shared concerns, real consequences, and common responsibilities.

So, online, we read about people admitting to murder (these are often interpreted as soldiers writing about the experience of war) and enjoying child pornography: “A recent message on ivescrewedup.com reads, ‘I have killed four people. One of them was a 17 year old boy.’” See Fantz, “Forgive Us Father.” 8 Ray Oldenberg. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Ships, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). On virtual environments as communities, see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993). 9 There is, too, the word “world.”


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

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: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, 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, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Newman, Peter, and Jeff Kenworthy. Winning Back the Cities. Sydney: Photo Press, 1996. Norquist, John. The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life. New York: Perseus Books, 1999. Nyhan, David. “For the Planet’s Sake, Hike the Gas Tax.” The Boston Globe, November 28, 1997: A27. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Co., 1999. Orfield, Myron. Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1997. Palmer, Thomas. “Pacifying Road Warriors.”


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

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: 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

Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies. 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: 317 words: 107,653

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, zero-sum game

Jackson is doubtful that architects can design memorable places like these, at least on purpose; for him habitation will trump design every time, and that is how it should be. Certainly it is true that some of the best places are not made so much as remade, as people find new and unforeseen ways to inhabit them over time. Alexander, an architect himself, has more faith that an architect can design the “great good place,” but not entirely by himself and probably not all at once. This is because no single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and thick as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past, and also the future. The first move is obvious enough: The architect borrows from the past by adapting successful patterns, the ones that have been proven to support the kind of life the place hopes to house—porches and watching the world go by, for example.


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

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 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

., McCahill, M. and Wood, D., The Growth of CCTV: A Global Perspective, Surveillance and Society, www.surveillance-and-society.org/cctv.htm Novak, M. and Highfield, R., SuperCooperators: Beyond the Survival of the Fittest, Canongate, 2011 Nunns, A. and Idle, N., Tweets from Tahrir, OR Books, 2011 Oldenburg, C., The Great Good Place, Da Capo, 1999 O’Neill, O., A Question of Trust, CUP, 2002 Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, CUP 1990 Owen, D., Green Metropolis, Riverhead, 2010 Owen, D., ‘The Efficiency Dilemma’, New Yorker, 20 December 2010 Patel, S. and Arputham, J., ‘An Offer of Partnership or a Promise of Conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2007 Patel, S. and Arputham, J., ‘Plans for Dharavi’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2008 Patel, S., Burra, S. and D’Cruz, C., ‘Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) – Foundations to Treetops’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2001 Patel, S., Arputham, J., Burra, S. and Savchuk, K., ‘Getting the Information Base for Dharavi’s Redevelopment’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2009 Patel, S. and Mitlin, D., ‘Gender Issues and Slum/Shack Dweller Foundation’, IIED, Gender and Urban Federations, 2007 Pearce, F., Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash, Eden Project Books, 2010 Pereira, F., Vaccari, A., Glardin, F., Chiu, C. and Ratti, C., ‘Crowd Sensing in the Web: Analysing the Citizen Experience in the Urban Space’, senseable.mit.edu/papers/publications.html Perlman, J., Favela: Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, OUP, 2012 Peter, P.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

(www.cts.cv.ic.ac.uk/staff/wp5-noladn.pdf) Paper to January 20001 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board Norberg-Schulz, C (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenological Approach to Architecture, Rizzoli, New York Norberg-Schulz, C (1969) Meaning in architecture, In Jencks, (Editor) Meaning in Architecture, The Cresset Press, London Norberg-Schulz, C (1965) Intentions in Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass O Oc, T & Tiesdell, S (2000) Urban design approaches to safer city centres: The fortress, the panoptic, the regulatory and the animated’, in Gold, J R & Revill, G (2000) (Editor) Landscapes of Defence, Prentice Hall, Harlow, 188–208 Oc, T & Tiesdell, S (1999) The fortress, the panoptic, the regulatory and the animated: Planning and urban design approaches to safer city centres, Landscape Research, 24(3), 265–286 Oc, T & Tiesdell, S (1997) Safer City Centres: Reviving the Public Realm, Paul Chapman Publishing, London Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) (2005) Planning Policy Statement (PPS) 1: Delivering Sustainable Development, The Stationery Office, London ODPM (2002) Better Streets, Better Places: Delivering Sustainable Residential Environments, ODPM, London Oldenburg, R (1999) The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and the Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (third edition) Marlowe & Company, New York Osbourne & Gaebler (1992) Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Plume Publishing, New York Osborne F 1918; (second edition 1942) New Towns After the War, J M Dent Publishers, London Oswalt, P (2006) (editor) Atlas of the Shrinking City, Hatje Cantz, Netherlands Oswalt, P; Misselwitz, P; & Overmeyer, K (Urban Catalyst) (2007) Patterns of the unplanned, in Franck K & Stevens Q (2007) (editors) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, Routledge, London, 271–288 Owens, S (1992) Energy, environmental sustainability and land-use planning, in Breheny, M (1992) (editor) Sustainable Urban Development and Urban Form, Pion, London P Panerai, P; Castex, J; Depaule, J C; & Samuels, I (2004) Urban Forms: The Death and Life of the Urban Block, Architectural Press, Oxford Papadakis, A (1993) (Editor) Terry Farrell: Urban Design, Academy Editions, London Papadakis, A & Watson, H (1990) (Editors) New Classicism, Academy Editions, London Papadakis, A & Toy, M (1990) Deconstruction: A Pocket Guide, Academy Editions, London Parfect, M & Power, G (1997) Planning for Urban Quality, Urban Design in Towns and Cities, Routledge, London Parolek, D; Parolek, K & Crawford, P (2008) Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities and Developers, Wiley, New Jersey Peck, J (2001) Neoliberalising states: Thin policies/hard outcomes, Progress in Human Geography, 25(3), 445–455 Pendlebury, J (1999) The conservation of historic areas in the UK: A case study of ‘Grainger Town’, Newcastle upon Tyne Cities, 16(6), 423–433 Pendlebury, J. (2000) Conservation and regeneration: Complementary or conflicting processes?


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Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

Here is a man who had spent many chapters of his life in England, who would become a naturalized Englishman in his final year, and one of whose guiding principles was that anything, or anybody, covered in moss was by definition deserving of reverence. Yet here he was, still in the entrance hall of a new century, having the wit to wonder if his homeland would, after all, turn out to be what he would call the Great Good Place; if the same adventure in consciousness that drew Isabel Archer over the sea would lead others to make the return trip, unable to resist the temptations, the edifying screwups, of the moral hazard. His instincts, as ever, were correct, and people have spent the last ninety years or so in James’s trembling wake; even if you remain on English soil and merely read your way into America, you are stepping westward.