Whether you have ever actively thought about how coffee bars influence your own need for them and how they make your city, Wietze Gelmers will make you reflect on this in new ways in his photo essay! So grab a coffee (to stay or to go), open your laptop, and read this great contribution with insights from Vancouver, Amsterdam, and several other cities!
Whether you’re strolling down the streets of Amsterdam or Vancouver, Seattle or Istanbul, New York or Kunming, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get an opportunity to satisfy your urgent need for a daily shot of caffeine. Nowadays, most cities across the world experience a similar transformation: specialty coffee bars are mushrooming throughout the streets. Where it was chain-based giant Starbucks that set the tone by introducing specialty coffee from the 1970s onwards, it appears that the heydays of Frappuccino’s are long gone.
Starbucks at Pike Place Market. This is where it all started, back in 1971.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Seattle)
Nowadays, chain-based coffee bars such as Starbucks are less popular.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
Increasingly, independent coffee bars pop up like daisies across cities. Coffee, even more than ever before, appears to be ingrained in our urban lifestyle. From dusk till dawn, Monday to Friday, being out east or west: there’s simply no escaping independent specialty coffee bars in your city. It appears that they are here ‘to stay’, now that specialty coffee is hot.
Early commuters grab a coffee to-go at Revolver before going to work.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
White Label Coffee is one of the few specialty coffee bars located in de Baarsjes.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
Kaffe 1668 is right around the corner of New York’s CBD and WTC.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, New York)
Often labeled as markers of gentrification (Bridge & Dowling, 2001) or domains of a new urban middle class (Zukin, 2010), specialty coffee bars are in most cases found in gentrifying areas which are inhabited by young, well-educated residents. They display distinctive consumption preferences and lifestyles, and allow for cosmopolitan authenticity. In some cases, like happened with Coffee Bru at Amsterdam’s Beukenplein, specialty coffee bars become part of renewal plans, because of their ability to attract particular people to neighborhoods. Planned or not, specialty coffee bars are anywhere. Their inevitable presence changes consumption landscapes, and is drastically reshaping cities.
Amsterdam’s Coffee Bru is part of a larger urban renewal process.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
A ‘Third Wave’ in Coffee
Independent specialty coffee bars are typical for a third wave in coffee. This time, product and quality are central. Coffee is brewed out of exotic beans from Nicaragua or Rwanda, by using a V60 or Aeropress. Specialty coffee embodies quality, craftsmanship, and taste. It is a mixture of art and science, often performed in places that are more than simply a coffee bar. Barbershops, bookstores, or bicycle repair shops: they all serve specialty coffee. As for consumers, connoisseurship is crucial: specialty coffee signals a sense of sophisticated knowledge and taste. It allows one to display its personality, lifestyle, and cultural values.
Pick your beans. Exotic ones, from Brazil, Rwanda, or Ethiopia.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
The craftsmanship of brewing coffee: science meets art.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
At Blind Barber, they serve Blue Bottle Coffee, and trim your beard.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, New York)
Coffee ‘connoisseurship’ is all about sophisticated knowledge and taste.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
Besides that specialty coffee bars offer an experience, a means for personal presentation, and ridiculously tasteful coffee, it also appears that people simply ‘like to be here’. Why is it that specialty coffee bars in particular are so popular? Part of this is found in the appearance and usage of specialty coffee bars. Often characterized by a slick and industrial, yet cozy and living room-like setting, most independent specialty coffee bars offer a ‘homey’ atmosphere. They feel like third places (see Oldenburg, 1999), by offering visitors ‘a home away from home’. A place that is extremely suitable to meet up with friends, or simply to relax.
Aperture Coffee Bar provides ‘a home away from home’.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
A slick and industrial, yet cozy setting. A coffee-bar must have!
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Chicago)
Concrete? Check. Wood? Check. Wiring? Check.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
For others, coffee bars are the perfect office. We’ve witnessed a rise of working-patterns which are both spatially and temporally flexible: people love to work out of home, e.g. in specialty coffee bars. There’s great coffee, free Wi-Fi, and the co-presence of like-minded people. That’s some fruitful ground to get your work done!
‘A sea of MacBooks’: coffee bars are a perfect office to flex-workers.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Seattle)
Grounds for social interaction?
As shown, the physical presence of specialty coffee bars changes consumption landscapes and cities. But, what is their potential socially? Traditionally, sociologists like Habermas (1989) and Oldenburg (1999) have considered coffeehouses to be important public places, praised for their publicity and social sphere. They enabled and facilitated social interaction and communion. In here, conversation and sociability reigned. However, looking at the endless numbers of smartphones and laptops, that appears to be history. Social interaction never looked so dull.
Laptop users are often perceived as anti-social, not concerned about others.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
Many specialty coffee bars view free Wi-Fi as a necessity to attract people, and thus business. Others, however, feel that Wi-Fi endangers their social sphere. People are acting in isolation, mostly concerned with work, study, or private connections. It undermines interaction with the co-present others, often strangers, in specialty coffee bars. As a consequence, one finds many Wi-Fi and laptop-policies, all aimed at preserving the social sphere and ‘actual’ conversation.
Some specialty coffee bars have designated laptop-areas.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
Weekend means family-time. And thus, only Wi-Fi after 4 PM.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
Not sure if it’s in the name, but at Grumpy, laptops are not allowed!
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, New York)
Although some argue that laptops, smartphones, and Wi-Fi endanger social interaction, conversation, and community in specialty coffee bars, one could reconsider this argument. In an increasingly individualistic, yet (online) interconnected world, digital mobile devices have become crucial for maintaining part of our social relations. It allows us to switch between worlds—both real-life and online—and to interact alternately with strangers in our immediate surroundings, as well as ‘distant’ friends. Smartphones and laptops in specialty coffee bars don’t necessarily signal a demise of social interaction: rather, they show a complex duality of our social interactions. As physical places, specialty coffee bars facilitate both of these interactions. By enabling randomized encounters, various types of relationships, and networks, specialty coffee bars are vital urban places. They are here to stay!
Whether it is in real-life or online, specialty coffee bars are considered to be vital urban grounds for facilitating various forms of social interaction. How many different forms do you identify?
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
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