Coffee Shops: Exploring Urban Sociability and Social Class in the Intersection of Public Private Space
Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
Type
Thesis (B.A.)
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
en_US
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
This thesis presents the coffee shop as a center for urban sociability and traces its development over time. In order to contextualize and unpack the social meaning and uses of a coffee shop, I use theories of public and private place, placemaking, and sociability, with an emphasis on third places and their role in the urban public sphere. “The places where people meet to drink coffee have facilitated the development of what is now typically and stereotypically construed as the public realm,” comments John Manzo (2014), situating coffee shops in the discussion of public and private space. I build on this to investigate how the dichotomy between public and private space is mediated by third places, with the coffee shop as an example of a space that people think of as a third place. The methods I used in my research include reviewing the literature on public and private places, analyzing coffee shop history, examining media representations of coffee culture, and observing in coffee shops located in the New York City borough of Manhattan. My findings challenge the notion of the coffee shop as a third place as conceived by Oldenburg (1989) and show how coffee shops reproduce social class inequality. I offer an alternative conception of the third place, redefining it in terms of hybrid spaces, or spaces that lie in the intersection of the public and the private.