Mingling, observing, and lingering: everyday public spaces and their implications for well-being and social relations

A study of ordinary public space in East London that takes seriously the people who are only there because they have to be.

Cattell, Dines, Gesler & Curtis (2008). Health & Place 14(3), 544–561. Read it.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

A market, a park, a street. The three verbs in the title are three different ways of using a public place, and only one of them is the sociable one that Oldenburg writes about. Mingling is what he describes. Observing and lingering are what most people are actually doing, and this paper shows they carry benefits too.

Week 7 is involuntary places: the laundromat, the waiting room, the bus stop. Nobody chooses them and nobody is a regular by design, and yet the same things happen. Read this for the finding that the merely tolerated public place does more social work than its users would ever claim for it — and then go and watch one for an hour.