"The café-chain appears as a corpse-maggot hatching when culture dies" : Agency and meaning in an Espresso House coffee-shop

Abstract: This paper explores the terms placelessness (Relph 1976) and Private Owned Public Space (Arefi 1999; Németh, 2009) through a case study of one coffee-shop belonging to the chain Espresso House. This Espresso House shop is made to be conform and homogenous which according to the theory of placelessness makes it devoid of meaning. The space is also privately owned. Spaces being privately owned attributes to their conformity since their form of ownership predetermines possible social interactions and activities by only allowing some people to use the spaces and some activities to take place in the spaces (Németh 2009; Arefi 1999; Mitchell 1995). This paper shows that there are many spontaneous, place-specific and meaningful features in this space as well as homogeneous and predetermined ones and concludes that both the homogenous- and the specific qualities contribute to the sense of place. Furthermore, it discusses the agency of the different actors in this privately owned, publicly used space.