Connected and sociable: third places in the post-digital city

The social and economic life of the ‘post-digital city’ is the focus of this latest CAMEo Cut. Alexandra Kviat examines the ways in which ‘third places’ –such as cafes, bars and bookstores – provide an intermediate, loosely defined space between work and leisure, where urban connections can take place, in both a digital and more ‘analogue’ social context. Yet, in challenging any strict separation between digital and analogue worlds, and by using the example of Ziferblat, the world’s first‘pay-per-minute cafe’, she shows how urban life and third place sociability is becoming both more hybrid and integrated, suggesting new ways of being and living in the post-digital city that move us beyond traditional conceptual binaries. Finally, in the ongoing wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, she also explores some of the implications for the kinds of urban culture and embedded sociability characteristic of pay-per-minute cafes and other, similarly shared, urban spaces.