And well deserved praise indeed!

Swedish Magazine Credits Florida Sociology Professor for Sparking Interest in Quality Urban Living

Source article here at Axess, a magazine for the liberal arts and social sciences

The book, of course, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community which sets forth what I think is the novel and brilliant scheme of home, work and hangout as the central places of human life. The book has been enormously influential among people who care about cities but it's my impression that it has never been accorded the attention it deserves from "serious intellectuals." For example, it does not seem to been reviewed by the The New York Review of Books while a book like Re Koolhaas' S,M,L,Xl is feted.

I could be all wrong about this but it seems to me to be another sad sign of the dis-connect between the mind and body which infects so many intellectuals.

Comments

[Ian]

A long time ago (1900s) Patrick Geddes proposed the three factors of Place, Work and Folk as the keystones of urban living - sounds a lot like home, work and hangout to me!

[David Sucher]

Really? That's fascinating. I didn't know.
Do you have a reference?
The key issue of course is how he characterizes "Folk."
And perhaps more crucially, does Geddes offer the scheme as having a spatial dimenesion? Of course it is the spatial dimension that is at the heart of Oldenburg's work.