Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. My approach to cafés is to turn the tables' on theories of the public field and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public places. The particular topics I deal with in a worldly manner' are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following, but first a little history.
Café and bars came to replace the streets as the primary place for the common gathering of town and city residents in the late seventeen and early eighteen centuries in Britain Germany......
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Approximate Word Count: 915
Approximate Pages: 4 (260 words per double-spaced page) |