Is Shopping/Consuming/Driving a Substitution for the Third Place?

I've been reading a lot about "Third Places" in the past few days. For those of you who don't know, a Third Place (First being Home, Second being Work) is a community place to interact with other peeps. Ray Oldenburg, the Author of "The Great Good Place" declares four main requirements for a Third Place:

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."

In Raleigh, we even had a coffee shop called Third Place and it was exactly that. Here, we have our lovely JP's, and it functions wonderfully. The problem is, where are all the Third Places going ? Despite the Starbucks revolution there is still not a coffee shop or local bar within any sort of walking distance of most suburban homes and often there is relatively little seating there that is comfortable enough to envourage you to stay longer than it takes to finish your coffee. Former third places such as barber shops and beauty salons have ceased to exist in that function (unless you are watching Steel Magnolia's or Barbershop the movie). Chain stores and big boxes does not condone friendly loitering and scholarly discussion.

So what is the result then, of the general decline in third places and in an environment that could even support third places? People need a certain amount of social interaction within the day within different "spheres" of their life. That is to say that it is human to want interaction with co-workers or neighbors if you have only seen your family all day (this does not mean that you don't love them :-) ). So if one does not interact with such neighbors in an organic neighborhood setting, they may travel to do so. This is the case with telecommuters. When doing background research for my thesis, I found research (Harvey, A. and M. Taylor. "Activity Settings and travel behaviour: a social contact perspective." Transportation, 2000. Vol. 27, pp. 53-73.) that showed that despite telecommuters decreasing the amount of home-to-work traffic, they often made many short trips during the day, perhaps to "fill their non-family social interaction sphere". So instead, us suburbanites SHOP. I am not suggesting that b/c there are no third places we shop, but the act of shopping does fill a void of interaction, is free to do (as long as you don't buy anything) and is full of loitering teenagers and adults alike, meandering through aisles of "stuff". Sadly, the mall has become the social center of the suburban universe. sigh. Somehow, I think that perhaps the social capital of a mall is just not QUIIIITE equal to that of a third place...yay france!

Here are Oldenburg's comments about the positives 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