Public Place as a Resource of Social Interaction

Abstract

Recent studies show that with the increase of urbanization, local residents increasingly stay away from the public and semi-public places within the territory of their residential community. They retreat in their leisure time either into the privacy of their homes or escape into remote recreation areas, which we define as withdrawal from the local public place. The villages or towns thus mutate more and more into “dormitory communities” or “dormitory villages”, where the local residents live in the place nearly without interacting with each other and where hardly any public life takes place (Gans, 1969; Kruger, 1987; Brandenburg & Carroll, 1995; Buchecker and Schutz, 2000; Oosterman, 2002; Thorns, 2002). Fuhrer at al. (1993) found in their empirical study that deficiencies in the needsatisfaction within the private home are compensated by leisure mobility. Accordingly the withdrawal from the local public place also seems to be caused by a loss of need-satisfaction in these areas. But what are the needs that the local public place is supposed to satisfy?