(Meanwhile, let me continue to dwell in my old-fashioned almost-downtown neighbourhood — I don’t think I could handle the suburbs!)

@Michiel and the question of 3rd places: great points! There’s an article I saw via Regine’s “We Make Money Not Art” blog, in the Economist (April 10/08): “The new oases; Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic,” which you might find interesting, too. See: http://tinyurl.com/6nhzvy

What interests me is the kind of self-presentations that are performed in these new mediatized urban spaces. They seem to be neither about a purely public identity (front stage), nor a private identity (back stage – using Goffman’s well-known distinction). Instead, a kind of ‘playful identities’ are performed, in between work and leisure. The concept of “third places” is often used to denote the new places where urbanites do work ánd socialize at the same time. You have posted about Starbucks urbanism in an earlier post, which exactly fits this idea. Since those places tend to exclude younger people through various mechanisms, and young people in their teens/early twenties don’t frequent these spots for various reasons, teens look for their own “third places” where they are neither at work (in school) nor at home (in their private sphere). Just like their older counterparts in the cafés – who are in the presence of other people yet working on their own laptops while listening to music on earphones – what these young people do is a strange mixture of being within one’s own group, and being on display to others. They both here and there; inaccessible and shut-off physically, yet opening up for- and being available through new media; present at the physical location but also thinking about the media places they are performing for. What this means for new kinds of co-presence is indeed easier to ask than to answer.

A second thing I find interesting is how a particular type of ‘urban-ness’ is performed by choosing these specific locations. It appears these places seem nodes in a “street culture” mental map of what the (suburban) city looks like. It’s a different kind of urban imagination from the type of social and cultural nodes of the self-proclaimed creative class, exemplified best perhaps – again! – by the coffeehouse. The question is whether and where the “street” and “coffeehouse” conceptions of the (sub)urban meet. Are they totally incompatible? Is it only a matter of age difference? In a funny way, I guess you could see the work you describe as a kind of meeting between both types of urban imagination: street culture brought into the museum/art context (although it seems kind of one-way).