David Brooks starts his New York Times column today by outlining a tectonic cultural change in how Americans live. They used to crave space and order and golf courses, and so suburbs and exurbs ballooned as people abandoned the city cores and dispersed across the landscape. Now people are realizing they’ve been missing out on community and social bonds. “Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape”, e.g. “restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls”. And, downtowns are reviving as people move back to the cities “in search of human contact.”
I’m reading the news at Costello’s Travel Cafe, a Northeast Portland establishment, as I wait for my 9:30 appointment. Sleepy-eyed neighborhood people in their respective sweat pants or business casuals pick up their morning fix; the Laptop Nation shares bigger tables, pounding away; the beaproned owner comes out of the kitchen to greet the elderly regulars; sales calls and job interviews take place over scones (made on the premises). The service staff have been around since I first visited what seems like forever ago (know a coffee shop with zero turnover?), never failing to provide outstanding service.
Styled to resemble Holland’s brown cafes, Costello’s injects an international flavor into the Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood: European metropolitan memorabilia; flat screens looping footage from all over (European soccer matches on some nights); daily events such as foreign movie nights, live music, or language conversation; clocks showing time in different zones; lounge world beats in the background…
Portland, Oregon has consistently rated as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., and places like Costello’s are part of the reason. Third places, locations other than home and workplace where people spend significant time — meeting, reading, interacting, working, chatting — are “anchors of community life“, and Portland has plenty of them (though few as unassuming as Costello’s). Third places make the whole world my office.
If there’s a lesson here for sustainable marketing it’s this: in order to build and cultivate community, you need a place for the members to interact. Physical or virtual, permanent or event-based, the third place must be more than a mere location; it must generate and foster a sense of place – a distinct and authentic identity and character that emerges from human engagement, giving it a collective meaning and purpose.
When Julia’s Cafe opened a few doors down on NE Broadway, hoping to do better as the deli it had replaced, it barely made a mark on the neighborhood; it sits empty while people at Costello’s face the challenge of finding a free seat.
Photo credits: watch_me_xplode and Eph Zero.
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Another iconic Portland “third place” is Lair Hill Cafe on SW First. Naturopathic students, neighborhood regulars, employees of nearby offices make a third home at Lair Hill. Two dollar corkage fee (at least when I last imbibed) for their retail bottles make it the best happy hour (or any hour, for that matter) in town. These places are what help people to feel more human amongst the bustle.
Not only is the development of a sense of community important to the creation of “sustainable marketing”, but it’s also critical to development of “sustainable community development.”
Last summer, while studying the decline in social capital in rural communities, I stumbled across Ray Oldenburg’s seminal work The Great Good Place. As he described the decline in third places in communities across the US, I came to realize how devastating this trend had been to rural communities.
As the number of places for people to meet and get to know each other declines, rural residents tend to trust each other less. And the more people distrust each other, the more the community is fragmented, making it more difficult for positive change to occur.
In other words, if we want “sustainable community development” we need third places in our communities.