Today’s interview is with Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University in Philadelphia, whose book Everything but the Coffee includes a chapter about Starbucks’s claim to provide us with third places. As he tells it, the Starbucks story is also our story, the story of human aspirations and fears, illusions and delusions. It tells us about the limits of American influence, and about the way we’ve taken comfort in green-washing instead of tackling environmental issues head-on. It’s the story of how a corporation can build its brand on the mere idea of community and sociability. “Starbucks has come to own our expectation of what a coffee shop is. What I would argue is that Starbucks, in distorting the notion of third place, made it even harder for us to find…. When we're arguing over whether a Starbucks store is a third place, when that's the argument, we've lost.”

Diplomacy expert Richard Higgott discusses “The Strongman Problem” in terms of what it means for the collective problem-solving required to deal with war, climate change, pandemics, cyber-insecurity, and economic inequality. This means that traditional international relations research needs to look beyond institutions and policies to consider the impact and personality types of individual leaders, male and female, in order to reckon with the danger posed by today’s “strongmen.” He points out, for example, that zero-sum “strongman” leaders tend to prolong wars and violence. This conversation took place shortly after the 2024 election of Donald Trump in the US, when Professor Higgott was in Hungary, a country led by one of Trump’s fellow “strongman” leaders.

Just weeks after the COVID-19 shutdown here in Massachusetts, at the end of March 2020, Ray Oldenburg and I were interviewed for a Boston radio segment about the loss of third places. Journalists would find Ray via his publisher or the university, and he’d been passing them along to me. That was, to my knowledge, the last time a journalist was able to interview Ray, and you can hear him in this brief clip.

Robert Yaro, cofounder of North Atlantic Rail, a project he started after retiring from the Regional Plan Association. Bob is especially well known for his work on urban development, but I was pleased to learn that earlier in his career he founded the Center for Rural Massachusetts at UMass. (We often talk on Train time about the way rail can help solve the problems created by the rural-urban divide.)

For many years Bob was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has also taught at Columbia and Harvard. As you'll hear, he has a broad knowledge of issues related to passenger rail.

Thanks for listening! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Show notes

Read more about Bob Yaro.

Read about North Atlantic Rail (check out the maps!).

When I was invited to talk about third places at the WRLDCTY Conference in Spain, I first said that I couldn’t travel this autumn and that I wasn’t willing to speak by Zoom, after the awful experience I had with a Zoom panel for the New Jersey Futures conference. Talking about third places should be face to face, I said. The organizers of WRLDCTY were amazing: they found a colleague with a home in Great Barrington who would interview me, and then arranged for a videographer to meet us at Lake Mansfield. That film is in their hands now. I made this short recording on my own computer, using Zoom, after walking home from the interview, to capture the points I’d just explained to Steven Pedigo when we were sitting up by Lake Mansfield.

"Beto O'Rourke: Air of Authenticity" from The Bulwark

Beto's Texas voter registration group, "Powered by People"

Beto wrote about visiting Ulysses, Kansas in 2018

This conversation with Joe Keohane, author of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World, takes us beyond the usual question about social skills and anxiety management. His book is about the joy of talking to strangers. Joe offers his own stories about talking to strangers as he explains some of the research that has been done on social interaction and recounts efforts to encourage people to talk across political or regional divides.

If you have the idea that third places have disappeared, this conversation with Kathy Giuffre, an American sociologist now settled in an Italian village, will be inspiring. Guiffre used Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place in her teaching for many years, and this podcast focuses on how third places are able to survive and thrive. She talks about the "pub" that is the center of village life, a place where people hang out and talk as well as drinking and dining - and dining well, of course, even when ordering the basic 2-course meal. The conversation here ranges from the loneliness of Giuffre's US students to the cultural values and government support that make this vibrant village pub possible. We also venture into some of the more complex aspects of third-place life: comfort with debate and disagreement, and the skills needed to make new friends.

Links

Kathy Giuffre's website with links to her writings and talks on how communities foster creativity

Kathy's blog, where you can read about life in the village and life in Italy

The Great Good Place: original edition and in-progress sequel by Karen Christensen

With the 2024 Olympic Games about to open in Paris, Karen Christensen talks with Professor Carlos Moreno of the Sorbonne about his work to encourage 15-minute cities, 30-minute regions, and other innovative, future-focused design strategies. We hear about a wide range of projects, from Utrecht in the Netherlands to Portland, Oregon and New Orleans in the United States as well as Cleveland, the Midwestern industrial city.

Carlos Moreno is a scientist at the Sorbonne in Paris, known internationally for pioneering approaches to urban issues such as the Human Smart City, the 15-Minute City, and the 30-Minute Territory.

Karen Christensen is the senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community, publisher of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability, and coauthor of the forthcoming sequel to The Great Good Place.

The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, May 2024)

Today we hear from James Gadsby-Peet about a very special pub, the Star of Greenwich, in south London. James explains how he and his partners found a way to save a historical British "local" and make it a third place for the 21st century - a new-style public house (pub is short for public house). He says "the superpower of third places is to help you meet people you wouldn't normally spend time with and to build your view of the world and your experience and your empathy for those people."

Links:

* The Star of Greenwich website

* Instagram @starofgreenwich

* LA Times article

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Coming soon! Visit https://greatgoodplace.org/ for details.