Amsterdam’s Coffee Bru is part of a larger urban renewal process. (Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
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.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Seattle)
(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.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
(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.
(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.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Amsterdam)
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, New York)
(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.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Chicago)
(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!
(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.
(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.
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
(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!
(Photo: Wietze Gelmers, Vancouver)
Nice read, Wietze. You’re clearly still addicted to coffee! 😉 What I do wonder though, is what about the limits of the current interpretations of coffee places? As your photos show, most of them look pretty much the same in the end. Their “home made special blend” may be different, but they all share the same concept and style. And more importantly, the similarieties can be recognized in the public they attract. In my opinion, they mostly facilitate a network of ‘third space users’ and people who (try to) like coffee, which, as you show, share and derive an identity with/from the place. What I personally miss at most of them is a real identity, or maybe better: diversity. When you would blindfold me and bring me to a coffee place, I could probably not say in which neighborhood, city or in some cases country I would be. I guess Habermass had a quite different coffee place in mind when he emphasized on the social functions of such places… The current form mostly serves the selected few that feel attracted to the specific style. But for a real social function, connecting different kinds of groups, most coffee places seem to have a too specific costumer base. Besides that it could contribute to the social cohesion within a neighborhood, I also think that it is necessary for the coffee places to stay exciting. After a while, people will not be surprised anymore when you sell your bike in a coffee place; they probably bought there own bike at a similar location. There is a limit to the creativeness of how to ‘decorate’ a coffee place, as the similarities of the pictures clearly show. What cán make your place unique, is an identity, and what’s more unique than the identity of the surrounding area?
Thanks, Rogier. You are right that, at least on the surface, they all look quite the same. And, most of them do attract a rather homogeneous, often ‘new middle class’, type of clientele. However, while talking to visitors, you would find clear differences per coffee bar. In some of these places, some feel connected towards others through the fact that they are ‘alike’ or share a similar lifestyle. In others, however, you’ll find patrons who relate themselves to others through a sense of physical proximity. In more established (independent) specialty coffee bars, you can sense a strong(er) notion of neighborhood ‘community’ between visitors. These coffee bars serve as meeting places for neighbors, and often through random encounters, meetings between (unfamiliar) neighbors occur. So, although these specialty coffee bars may be attracting a rather homogeneous group of visitors, they still possess an important social function – be it somewhat different than back in the days.
An interesting article which touches upon a number of issues I’m currently exploring in a research project based in the UK. Would be great to talk more about your research at some point.