Disappearing Social Spaces and The Third Place

Before the core settings of an informal public life can be restored to the urban landscape and re-established in daily life, it will be necessary to articulate their nature and benefit. The core settings of the informal public life must be analyzed and discussed in terms comprehensible to these rational and individualistic outlooks dominant in thought. We must dissect, talk in terms of specific payoffs, and reduce special experience to common labels. We must urgently begin to defend these Great Good Places – as Professor Ray Oldenburg calls them – against the unbelieving and the antagonistic, and do so in terms which are clear to all.
Oldenburg introduced the term “the third place” to describe articulately “the core settings of informal public life”. The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work. Read more…

The Differences Arise In Group Psychology

The behaviour of the group is enigmatic and group psychology has long been studied to understand certain behaviours. A group acts in our minds as a corporate person in as much as we imagine what the norm is and normalize behaviour to what this imagined person embodies. This gives rise to worrying outcomes in many situations. Throughout history, the madness of crowds has been known to overtake the individual responsibility of thinking and acting according to personal responsibility.
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Social Capital and Pierre Bourdieu: A Digest

Pierre Bourdieu is a sociologist who’s interest focused on social class and stratification along with inequality. His perspectives evolved through trying to develop a cultural anthropology of social reproduction. In the 1960s he described the dynamics of structured sets of values and ways of thinking as forming ‘the habitus’. This alludes to the space between the subjective agency and objective position.
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The World Bank and Social Capital by Juan Guerra

Hi, my name is Juan. Many years ago, I fundraised my way into university. I could have missed out because of money and that sparked a fire in me: I decided to dedicate my career to making poverty optional.

And so, as a young student, I started researching what tools could be used to tackle poverty. A powerful one I came across is social capital. I knew exactly how this could work, because it was what I used to get to university in the first place. I was never very academic, so please forgive the sloppiness of my writing, but this is a paper I wrote when I was 21. Read more…