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The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, 1999, New York: Marlowe and Company.

Reviewed by Jerry Kloby

One of the important ingredients in building community is a physical design that facilitates social interaction. It is difficult for people to develop the networks that are a crucial part of human social systems unless there are places for encounters to take place. Without casual regular encounters it is very difficult for all the other steps in community building to take place: discussion, organization, action, accomplishment, etc. Indeed, one of the main points that Benjamin Barber makes in A Place for Us is that enlarging and reinforcing public space is an important element in strengthening civil society.

Public space, in the sense used here, is not restricted to government created space or publicly owned space, but denotes, more generally, anyplace where people are able to congregate and socialize, i.e. where informal social interaction can take place on a regular basis.

These are the sorts of public spaces that The Great Good Place is about. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg refers to them as “third places”, the first two being home and the workplace. Third places are the core settings for informal public life, they are places where people can meet old friends, make new acquaintances, discuss the important issues of the day, and temporarily throw off the weight of the world that can drag them down. Oldenburg claims that involvement in informal public life has important psychological, social, and political implications, and such involvement is made possible by the existence of third places.

Some essential ingredients for successful third places include:
1. They must be free or relatively inexpensive to enter and to purchase food and drinks.
2. They must be highly accessible, ideally one should be able to get there by foot from one’s home.
3. A number of people can be expected to be there on a daily basis.
4. All people should feel welcome, it should be easy to get into a conversation. A person who goes there should be able to find both old and new friends each time they visit.

Unfortunately, American society, in large part, is lacking in third places. This is especially true of the suburbs that grew so dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s, but it also plagues more recent residential developments as many Americans substitute a vision of the ideal home for that of the ideal city. As Oldenburg notes: “They proceed as though a house can substitute for a community if only it is spacious enough, entertaining enough, comfortable enough, splendid enough – and suitably isolated from that common horde that politicians still refer to as our ‘fellow Americans.’”

Third places play a vital role in many parts of the world and different types of third places can provide a nation with its own characteristic charm: cafes in France, beer gardens in Germany, piazzas in Italy, pubs in England and Ireland, teahouses in Japan, are some well-known examples. In the U.S. the role has been played by many different places from local parks to barber shops and hair salons, to soda fountains and bookstores. But increasingly high rents, competition for profits, and the development of national chains, has turned many of the commercial third places into quick service (fast customer turnover), high priced businesses that do not meet the broader needs of citizens. In this day of the $20 haircut and $3 cup of coffee, who can really afford to linger and socialize in such environments? Likewise, municipal community centers often have rigidly maintained schedules to accommodate different groups of residents, and they lack a casual “drop in” character.

The consequences of the disappearance of third places, and poor urban/suburban planning, are a decline in social capital, and greater stress on intimate relationships (especially the institution of marriage). Oldenburg, joining the voices of Margaret Mead and many sociologists who specialize in the family, notes that “In the absence of an informal public life, people’s expectations toward work and family life have escalated beyond the capacity of those institutions to meet them.”

The loss of third places makes it harder to make acquaintances and develop friendship but the need to do so is clear. People who are isolated tend to be less happy and less healthy. Given the nature of work today, and living conditions that isolate people, married couples face more stress as the relationship is unable to fulfill all the needs and expectations that are best met by an extensive social network. The bottom line is that people need both intimacy and affiliation:

“Third place friendships, first of all, complement more intimate relations. Those who study human loneliness generally agree that the individual needs intimate relationships and that he or she also needs affiliation. To affiliate is to be a member of some club, group, or organization. The tie is to the group more than to any of its individual members. There is a great difference between intimacy and affiliation, and there is no substituting one for the other. We need both. Lacking intimacy, affiliation becomes little more than a means of dulling the sense of emptiness in our lives. Lacking affiliation, intimacy becomes overburdened even as it risks the dullness or restricted human contact.”

The best third places are those that are inclusive and local. Particularly beneficial are those “that render the best and fullest service are those to which one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there.” Third places are not important solely on the psychological level, they are (or can be) important on the political level as well. Ruling elites are often aware of the political potential inherent in informal gathering places and actively work to discourage them. Sweden’s rulers, for example, “banned the drinking of coffee in the eighteenth century. Officialdom was convinced that the coffeehouses were ‘dens of subversion where malcontents planned revolts.’”

Oldenburg believes that the reinvigoration of grass-roots political society is needed but for this to occur the reestablishment of public gathering spaces is essential. Other benefits will accrue as well, as people begin to feel that more and more space outside the home belongs to them. People who feel a sense of ownership of a place tend to act more responsibly and they monitor what is happening. Third places help the village raise the child.

There are things to quibble about in Oldenburg’s book but they are greatly outshone by the two very important themes woven through The Great Good Place. Much to his credit, Oldenburg elevates the status of places often denigrated by public officials, planners, and even the general public, by pointing out the valuable psychological, social and political functions served by places commonly referred to as “hangouts.” Second, he gives us a call to action, for all of us to work in the face of the private commercialization of space to preserve existing third places and to develop many new and better ones

Some of the positive functions of third places:
1. Third places provide a place for people to get to know each other.
2. A third place can act serve as a neutral ground which provides an ease of association.
3. They provide a sorting area where one can meet people with similar interests.
4. They bring together people for the first time who may later go on to develop other forms of association.
5. They provide a staging area. It times of local crisis people can assemble and arrange ways of helping each other.
6. Third places help create “public characters” – people who seem to know everybody in the neighborhood. They keep an eye on things, they alert parents about their child’s behavior before things reach a critical point, they welcome others to the neighborhood.
7. They bring youths and adults together.
8. They provide a place for the elderly to meet and interact with each other as well as those who are younger than they.
9. They unite the neighborhood.
10. They provide a place for exchanging information.
11. Third places serve as political forums.
12. They serve as offices for those who don’t have them or as neutral ground for those that do.

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