Cities and Coffee

New Forms of Mobility and Social Practices: The Starbucks Cafés in Beijing

By May 1st 2006, there were 206 Starbucks in China, with 50 in Beijing and 66 in Shanghai. The rate of openings is high, with a new café every week. The implantation strategy aims to attract clients with high purchasing power by locating the shops in the "trendiest" and busiest localities, where the most expatriates circulate.
Although the phenomenon is part of a certain standardisation of the world, it is something other than a producer of unaesthetic "junk space", an urban product of modernisation. It can be envisaged as an open public space, in the sense that it is not only a place for social activity, but also because it contributes to "producing the city". In 2002 the company developed the concept of a third place, between the office and home.
If Starbucks cafés avoid the fate of the malls and are not listed as "non-places" by American radical geography, it is no doubt because of their urban functions: as landmarks for journeys and as havens for individuals in search of a pause or a meeting-place. All the more so as in Beijing there are few public meeting-places; the Starbucks cafés partially fulfil this function.
They polarise the supply of mobility linked to the technical networks (wireless and electric outlets, access to transport networks) and of social mobility, whether imaginary (blended images of modernity—depending on the culture and the imagination of the user) or real (social mixing set apart by the situation of a selective public place). They constitute, on a metropolitan scale, both a linking space with the globalised economy and a new form of space that renews the urban landscape, blending the local and foreign social elites. Their strategic geographical location and their amenities, linked to the new social practices of nomadism have created a different place which has many more functions than just that of cybercafé. The spread of Starbucks cafés has followed all the modern contours of its proven American model, but has adapted to the territorial context, even if they present certain aspects (extraterritoriality and standardisation) that make them like non-places .
In Beijing, the Starbucks ecosystem seems to be a two-fold answer: to an absence (the public place as meeting place), and to a new demand (a territory for mobility). The third place is aimed at people in a nomadic situation. It's an ad hoc place to free oneself from spatial constraints and to be everywhere and always on. It serves as a bridge, making continuity possible in urban space, but remains highly dependent on geographic localisation. The logic of the selection of Starbucks' locations leads to a geographic concentration in the city which cannot be neutral in the production of urban space and practices. While Starbucks cafés are evidence of the spatial externalisation of the office function (whether SOHO or not), here they serve as urban meeting-places. This dual characteristic produces a new urban configuration, with highly contextualised and coded forms of sociability.