Alexandra Kviat

This chapter explores the concept of authenticity in the context of today's highly competitive hospitality industry. Drawing on the multi-sited ethnographic case study of Ziferblat, the world's first pay-per-minute cafe franchise, the author examines how the imperative of authenticity is addressed by small international enterprises falling in between the categories of chain and independent. By tracing how Ziferblat's original concept, shaped by the personal and socioeconomic background of its founder, was subsequently transformed by the local teams and adapted to different cultural-geographical contexts, this chapter adds new empirical evidence to the dynamic and pluralistic notion of multiple authenticities.

Although prosumption and the sharing economy are currently at the cutting edge of consumer culture research, little attempt has been made to explore the theoretical relationship between these concepts and approach them with a pluralistic, dynamic, nuanced and ethnographically informed lens moving beyond the dichotomies of capitalism versus anti-capitalism, rhetoric versus reality, exploitation versus empowerment and traditional versus digital consumer culture. This article addresses these gaps by focusing on the phenomenon of pay-per-minute cafes – physical spaces inspired by digital culture and meant to apply its principles in the brick-and-mortar servicescape. Drawing on a multi-site, multi-method case study of the world’s first pay-per-minute cafe franchise, the article shows a multitude of ways in which prosumption and the sharing economy, both shaped by different configurations of organisational culture, physical design, food offer and pricing policy, are conceived, interpreted and experienced by the firms and customers across the franchise and argues that conflicts and contradictions arising from this diversity cannot be reduced to the narrative of consumer exploitation. Finally, while both prosumption and the sharing economy are typically defined by the use of digital platforms, this article makes a case for a post-digital approach to consumer culture research, looking into the cultural impact of digital technology on traditional servicescapes.

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.

This thesis offers the results of the first in-depth sociological examination of a new form of urban public place—multifunctional venues known as ‘pay-per-minute cafes’, ‘anti-cafes’, or ‘time cafes’. Charged by the minute and provided with free wifi and access to kitchen facilities, visitors of such spaces are entitled to use them as they see fit, as they are designed to accommodate various social, cultural, ‘home-from-home’ and work activities. The first establishment of this kind, Ziferblat, opened in 2011 in Moscow as a social experiment seeking to build ‘social media in real life’, turn consumers into producers and overcome the limitations of the functionalist urban planning separating home, work and leisure from each other. In recent years, Ziferblat’s look-alikes have spread overseas to Europe, Asia and North America. Meanwhile, Ziferblat itself has developed into an international franchise with 18 branches, five of which are located in the UK. To unpack this phenomenon, I traced the history of Ziferblat and ethnographically explored its everyday routines in four venues located in Moscow, London and Manchester. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, combining urban sociology, urban media studies, human geography, cultural anthropology, and consumer culture research, I used the case study of Ziferblat to examine the intricate dynamics of urban placemaking, realised through the continuous interplay between the three dimensions of place (Lefebvre, 1991)—conceived (place as it is envisioned by its founder), perceived (place as it is interpreted by its users, media, and the wider public), and lived (social practices and relations localised in the physical space). My analysis of Ziferblat as a contested space, co-constructed by its founder, franchisees, landlords, staff, guests, and the media, and shaped by local cultures, geographic locations, physical designs, and wider economic and political factors, advances the growing literature on urban placemaking, largely dominated by a normative and instrumental approach, by offering a more critical and theoretically informed perspective, bringing into focus the issues of power and representation and acknowledging the historical and cultural contexts behind placemaking initiatives.

Thus, I argue that the emergence and quick expansion of pay-per-minute cafes indicates some important social and cultural shifts in the idea of public place, work, home, leisure, consumption and social interaction. Despite having originated from very specific historical and cultural circumstances, including long centuries of state control over public space, interrupted development of entrepreneurship, and the lack of so-called ‘third places’—informal meeting places outside home and work (Oldenburg, 1989), this Russian initiative reflects and embodies two interrelated global urban trends: the increasing spatial blurring of urban functions and the growing impact of digital culture on social life. This thesis expands the emerging literature on ‘the post-functionalist city’ (Di Marino and Lapintie, 2017), currently focused on the use of cafes, libraries and coworking spaces as temporary workplaces, by investigating the opportunities and challenges arising from mixing an even wider variety of functions—‘cafe’, ‘home from home’, ‘workspace’, and ‘cultural centre’—in one physical space. I show how this multifunctional approach empowers customers and allows for greater social diversity, but sometimes provokes personal anxieties, social conflicts, and licensing disputes. Furthermore, the thesis puts forward the original concept of ‘the post-digital city’—a new approach to urban placemaking, seeking to find the best balance between the advances of digital technologies and the value of unmediated, face-to-face interaction. Thus, Ziferblat is a connected and sociable space, welcoming all sorts of online activities and actively encouraging unmediated, ‘offline’ encounters through physical design, the work of hosts and the programme of events. The combination of these instruments produces great levels of sociability, but none of them alone is decisive. My research also challenges the assumption that digital technologies disrupt sociability in public places—in fact, the use of devices in Ziferblat often entails brief moments of cooperation between users, which, enhanced by the above-mentioned placemaking instruments, easily develop into deeper interactions. Overall, the case study of Ziferblat reveals the global demand for flexible public places, providing both technological connectivity and instant community experience.

The discussion on the post-functionalist and post-digital nature of Ziferblat concludes with recommendations for practitioners dealing with the issues of placemaking and community building in a climate of increasing geographic mobility, differentiation of lifestyles, precarity, social isolation, housing crisis and neoliberal urban policy.

I undertake Ziferblat case study in order to explore what kind of place anti-café is, how and why did this new phenomenon appear; how is it being experienced and framed by different people in different countries; and in what way does this phenomenon embody or challenge some theoretical concepts and problems which are currently being discussed in urban sociology, human geography, cultural studies, and marketing studies. Not only will this project sociologically unpack the phenomenon of anti-cafés itself, but it will also shed light on some cross-cultural differences in urban public space usage and café culture, and by so doing reveal and discuss some more general trends in this field, such as hybridisation, glocalisation, and commodification.

The reviewed book is one of the first edited volumes on the social and cultural role of the cafе. Drawing on such empirical trends as a rapidly increasing number of commercially viable cafеs and their growing significance in contemporary urban landscapes, the editors coin the notion of a “cafе society.” This concept, along with the Oldenburg’s term “third place”, is used as a core theoretical framework to unite fourteen researchers from different disciplines (sociology, urban studies, history, anthropology, geography, and communication studies) and countries (Norway, the UK, the USA, and Australia). The essays composing this book explore cafе as a cultural form and a social institution, touching upon such “Big Questions” as public sphere, civil society, and democracy; social interaction, sociability, and community; class, gender, and age; glocalisation, gentrification, and mediatisation.

Рецензия посвящена одной из первых в мире коллективных монографий о социальной и культурной роли кафе. Отмечая стабильный коммерческий успех индустрии кафе в разных странах и общий рост значимости этих заведений в современном городском ландшафте, редакторы сборника вводят термин café society. Этот концепт, вместе с ольденбурговским понятием «третьего места», выполняет функцию теоретической рамки, которая объединила четырнадцать представителей разных дисциплин (социология, урбанистика, история, антропология, география, коммуникативистика) и стран (Норвегия, Великобритания, США, Австралия). Авторы работ, составляющих книгу, исследуют кафе как культурную форму и социальный институт, затрагивая при этом такие проблемы, как публичная сфера, гражданское общество и демократия; социальная интеракция, социабельность и комьюнити; класс, гендер и возраст, глокализация, джентрификация и медиатизация.

This paper continues the series of articles that presents the results of research on annual do-it-yourself urban public event called City Picnic, organized by the group of civic activists in Omsk. To hold this free open-air festival, they raise money through crowdfunding and commercial sponsorship, lease half-abandoned private recreation camp, and convert it into one-day public space with a full spectrum of urban entertainment, including concerts, performances, exhibitions, lectures and workshops, RRFM, pop-up cafes, children’s playgrounds, etc. What follows is a cross-disciplinary case study that explores City Picnic by means of Foucauldian heterotopology and public sphere theory. Interpreting data collected through discourse analysis, I draw on the work of Dehaene and De Cauter, who were the first to problematize heterotopia’s relation to the public and the private, and then examine City Picnic in a broader context of contemporary public sphere and urban public space scholarship. As a result, City Picnic turns out to be a semi-public, or ‘club’ space (whilst its coordinators assume and position City Picnic as a public space); a mixed space that includes public, private, and parochial realms (where the rise of the last two, accompanied with attendance increase and territorial sprawl, poses a threat to its publicness); a proto-political space (whilst one of its basic principles claims: ‘No politics’); and a practice of occupation of a non-place, or ‘transformer space’.

Статья продолжает серию публикаций по итогам исследовательского проекта, посвященного омскому мероприятию «Городской пикник». Используя средства, собранные при помощи народного финансирования и привлечения коммерческих спонсоров, группа гражданских активистов раз в год арендует частную спортивную базу и превращает ее в однодневное публичное пространство, посетителям которого предоставляется полный спектр современных городских развлечений: концерты, перфомансы, выставки, лекции и мастер-классы, фримаркет, pop-up кафе, детские площадки и т.д. В статье изложены результаты кроссдисциплинарного кейс-стади, интерпретирующего «Городской пикник» с точки зрения двух подходов – фуколтианской гетеротопологии и теории публичной сферы. В качестве исходной теоретической модели используется концепция М. Дехане и Л. Де Каутера, которые впервые проблематизировали вопрос о соотношении понятия гетеротопии с категориями публичности и приватности; затем «Городской пикник» рассматривается в более широком контексте современных исследований публичной сферы и городского публичного пространства (Л. Лофланд, Э. Бриз, Н. Фрейзер и др.). Дискурс-анализ вербальных и визуальных текстов о «Городском пикнике» обнаружил следующие его свойства: полупубличность, или клубность (хотя организаторы воспринимают и позиционируют его как публичное пространство); сложное переплетение публичной, приватной и парохиальной сфер (причем развитие приватных и парохиальных связей, сопровождающееся разрастанием территории мероприятия и увеличением количества его посетителей, угрожает публичности «Городского пикника»); протополитический потенциал (в то время как один из ключевых принципов мероприятия гласит «Без политики»). Кроме того, «Городской пикник»  представляет собой практику апроприации не-места, или оккупирования «пространства-трансформера».

Foucault’s lecture “Of Other Spaces”, which was delivered in 1967 and remained unpublished until 1984, was extremely influential for space and place studies and even became a manifesto of the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences. The term “heterotopia”, introduced in this lecture, has had a great impact on many different fields from urban sociology and human geography to cultural anthropology and literary theory but also has been criticized for opacity, inconsistence and incoherence. This article presents first results of the research project that tries to concretize and operationalize the concept of heterotopia and aims to demonstrate how it can be used in research on new Russian urban culture phenomena. Using interdisciplinary methodology that combines Foucauldian heterotopology with Erving Goffman’s frame theory, I undertake a case study of Omsk annual DIY urban public event called City Picnic to analyze how particular “other space” manifests itself and how it is being conceptualized by its creators and visitors. These research questions were answered by means of discourse analysis supplemented with some traditional cognitive-linguistic methods such as cognitive modelling and mapping, semantic category analysis, prototype analysis, and conceptual metaphor analysis. Data collected for discourse analysis includes various verbal and visual texts about 2012, 2013 and 2014 City Picnics: (1) posts, comments and discussions on its official website, in its group on social networking service “VKontakte”, and in blogs; (2) media publications; (3) City Picnic logotypes, posters, banners, and maps; (3) photographs and photoshopped images made by City Picnic coordinators, members, visitors and journalists; (4) “spatial text” (zoning and design of the City Picnic territory).  As a result, City Picnic was described as a space that exhibits the following heterotopological characteristics: otherness, alterity, and deviance; heterogeneity and diversity; contesting and inverting of the real spaces and places; compensatory intention; heterochronism; combination of eternitary and chronic heterotopias; concentration and representation of other spaces, places, practices and cultures; fractality; semi-publicness; being the other of the political and the other of the economical. The article concludes with the outline of further directions of City Picnic heterotopology that will require analysis of its para-political potential and discussion of the public space commodification problem as well as its framing/misframing mechanisms study that will shed light on the process of “reading” heterotopia.   

Лекция М. Фуко «О других пространствах», впервые прочитанная в 1967 г. и опубликованная лишь семнадцать лет спустя, стала настоящим манифестом так называемого «пространственного поворота» в современном социально-гуманитарном знании и приобрела поистине легендарный статус в междисциплинарных исследованиях пространства. Введенное в ней понятие гетеротопии, часто критикуемое последователями Фуко за непрозрачность, противоречивость и абстрактность, применяется в самых разных областях знания от социологии города до культурной антропологии, от гуманитарной географии до теории литературы. Данная статья открывает цикл публикаций по результатам исследовательского проекта, цель которого – конкретизировать и операционализировать концепцию гетеротопии, продемонстрировать возможность ее применения в исследованиях новых феноменов российской городской культуры. Объект представленного здесь кейс-стади – массовое мероприятие «Городской пикник», которое ежегодно организует группа  гражданских активистов из Омска. В рамках междисциплинарной методологии, сочетающей гетеротопологию М. Фуко с социологической теорией фреймов И. Гофмана, рассмотрены конкретные проявления основных признаков гетеротопии и особенности их осмысления создателями и посетителями «другого пространства». В качестве метода исследования использовался дискурс-анализ, дополненный некоторыми элементами лингвокогнитивного анализа (когнитивное моделирование, анализ семантических категорий,  прототипов и метафор). Материалом дискурс-анализа стал корпус вербальных и визуальных текстов о «Городских пикниках» 2012, 2013 и 2014 гг., включающий в себя сообщения, комментарии и дискуссии организаторов, участников и посетителей, опубликованные на официальном сайте мероприятия, в посвященной ему группе в социальной сети «ВКонтакте» и в блогах; публикации в СМИ; логотипы, рекламные плакаты и карты «Городского пикника»; фотографии и фотоколлажи, выполненные организаторами, участниками, посетителями и журналистами; а также пространственный текст (зонирование и оформление территории). В результате исследования выявлен и описан следующий набор гетеротопических свойств «Городского пикника»: инаковость; девиационность; гетерогенность; оспаривание и переворачивание реального пространства; компенсаторность; гетерохронность; сочетание вечностной и временной гетеротопии; концентрирование и воспроизведение других пространств, практик и культур; фрактальность; полупубличность; специфические отношения с категориями экономического и политического.

One of the most popular subdisciplines of contemporary urban communication studies is mediated urbanism studies that examines media impact on urban space and its inhabitants. Thorough analysis of multiple works in this field revealed three paradigms of mediated urbanism studies: previrtuality (1950s – 1970s), virtuality (1990s – early 2000s), and postvirtuality (since mid-2000s). Key normative model of the postvirtual paradigm of mediated urbanism studies is City 3.0, where physical space and electronic space complement each other by combining new media technologies with traditional forms of non-mediated communication. In modern Russia this model manifests itself in third places (anticafes, coworkings, revitalized parks and libraries) and new urban communication practices (pop-up cafes, verbal book reviews exchange, escape rooms, etc.). For the present, these manifestations do not dominate in Russian urban culture – they rather create numerous spatiotemporal enclaves like Omsk City Picnic. 

Одно из самых популярных направлений современных городских коммуникативных исследований – медиаурбанистика, изучающая влияние медиатехнологий на городскую среду и интеракцию ее обитателей. Анализ многочисленных источников позволяет выделить три парадигмы развития медиаурбанистики: предвиртуальность (1950–1970-е гг.), виртуальность (1990-е – начало 2000-х гг.) и поствиртуальность (со второй половины 2000-х гг.). Нормативной моделью поствиртуальной медиаурбанистики является «город 3.0», где физическая и электронная среда дополняют друг друга, а новые медиатехнологии гармонично сочетаются с традиционными формами межличностной коммуникации. В современной России эта модель воплощается в таких процессах, как развитие третьих мест (антикафе, коворкинги, ревитализованные парки и библиотеки) и появление новых городских коммуникативных практик (фудмаркеты, обмен пересказами, офлайн-квесты и др.). Эти проявления поствиртуальности пока не доминируют в российской городской культуре, а образуют многочисленные локальные пространственно-временные анклавы, характерным примером которых является омский проект «Городской пикник».

This article describes the history of urban communication studies – a new interdisciplinary field that emerged in western science in the second half of the 20th century at the junction of urban studies and communication studies. It is a first review of this field since 1950s until the present, based on a thorough analysis of multiple sources, most of which are still unknown in Russia. The author states that there are two waves of urban communication studies and then concludes with the current state-of-the-field discussion. 

Статья посвящена истории городских коммуникативных исследований – нового междисциплинарного направления, возникшего в западной науке во второй половине XX века на стыке урбанистики и коммуникативистики. Впервые представлен исторический обзор развития этой области знаний за рубежом, начиная с 1950-х гг. до настоящего времени. В результате анализа многочисленных источников, большинство из которых до сих пор не были введены в теоретический аппарат российской науки, автор выделяет основные этапы развития городской коммуникативистики и ключевые тенденции современных коммуникативных исследований города.

Актуальное понятие «мем» рассмотрено в русле теории и практики PR с использованием методологии когнитивной лингвистики. Термин «мем» соотнесен с понятиями «концепт», «фрейм» и «скрипт». Выдвинута гипотеза о том, что мем является основной структурной единицей медиапространства. На примере тем, актуальных в российской политике 2011-2012 гг., описана типичная структура медиамема, функции медиамемов в политическом PR и некоторые приемы их использования. Намечены перспективы дальнейших исследований политических медиамемов.

The currently important notion of "meme" is analyzed within the frames of PR theory and practice by applying the methodology of cognitive linguistics. The term "meme" is correlated with the notions of "concept", "frame" and "script". A hypothesis that the meme is a major structural unit in the media landscape is advanced. In a case study of the issues contemporarily relevant to Russian politics of 2011-2012, the author describes a typical structure of the media meme, the functions of media memes in political PR and some techniques of their application. The prospects for further research into political media memes are outlined.

В статье описывается учебный кейс по антикризисному PR на примере скандальной истории с обнаружением сибирской язвы в пельменях омской компании «Дарина» (2010-2011 гг.). Приведена полная хронология развития кризисной ситуации, составленная на основе мониторинга открытых источников, даны подробные методические рекомендации по разбору кейса со студентами.

The article outlines crisis PR communication case study basing on example of scandalous incident that happened in 2010-2011 to one Siberian company, 'Darina', in which products anthrax bacillus was detected. The author introduces full chronology of 'Darina' crisis development and gives detailed methodological guidelines for studying this case with students.