After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe,... See more

If we don't have real third places, what do we have instead? Oldenburg calls what we have as non-places. In real places, a human being is a unique individual person. In non-places, individuality disappears and you're either a customer, a client, an address to be billed, or a car to be parked. Places have now mostly been reduced to consumerism.

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