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Showing posts from January, 2025

Can Coffee Shops Save America?

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  I have written before about the communitarian nature of coffee shops, but the salience of these little civic places bears repeating.  Cafes are, in many ways, community hubs that are integral to the robustness of civil society.  In my neighborhood, there is a cafe practically on every block. Some are, of course, more vibrant than others. While I can think of a few shops that are rather sterile and lacking in adequate seating, others are often crowded and bustling with conversation.  In Front Porch Republic - a publication that is easily becoming one of my favorites - Dennis Uhlman writes about the liveliness of his local coffee shop in Columbia, South Carolina: Baptist pastors, Presbyterian pastors, engineering students, and art students learn each other’s names in a way that would be unlikely in any other sort of social arrangement. Cafes, much like the one that Uhlman frequents, are third places. These are - as defined by Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term - i...

Safe Communities Are Healthy Communities

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People, before they can participate in civic life, must first feel safe.  In high-crime municipalities, citizens often do not have the leisure of becoming more engaged in their communities. Rather, they focus on survival.  Robert Steuteville, in an article for Public Square , writes that "people don’t linger in places where their hair stands on the back of their necks." One's environment must be conducive to civil society. For the article, he interviewed urban planner Ray Gindroz who remarked that "...if people feel lost or trapped within a public space, unable to see or find a quick way out, they will avoid it." I recently read Evicted by Matthew Desmond, a powerful book that follows the lives of poverty-stricken tenants in Milwaukee. The families that Desmond follows are simply in no position to think about joining book clubs or political campaigns; they are bogged down by, what my old NYU professor used to call, "the burden of necessity."  That is...