I SEE that next Tuesday has been designated "European Neighbours' Day", a continent-wide initiative begun a few years ago in France, writes Frank McNally
To mark the occasion, Dublin City Council's website has a series of "top tips" on being neighbourly. Controversially, this does not include anything about lending cups of sugar. But among the to-do list for those intent on outreach, it offers this radical suggestion: "Just say hello".
It's a sure sign of community breakdown when we need a special event promoting this sort of thing. All the more so when you consider that Irish people - if anything - used to take their responsibility as neighbours too seriously.
A generation ago, we could perhaps have benefited from a European Mind-Your-Own-
Business Day. Back then, local authorities might have offered top tips on how keep your nose out of other people's affairs (eg, "Don't peer from behind the curtains when your neighbours stagger home from the pub"). But how things have changed.
SPEAKING of pubs, the latest volume of the Institute of Public Administration's sociological chronicles - "Belongings: Shaping Identity in Modern Ireland" - landed on my desk the other day (with a thud).
The sixth of a series in which sociologists are invited to contemplate developments in Irish life, it is, as you can imagine, a bundle of laughs. But the chapter that particularly grabbed my attention was called "New places, non-places, and the changing landscape of the Irish pub".
The piece argues that the recent drastic decline in Irish pub numbers is part of a global trend whereby all "third places" - the name given by sociologists to communal neighbourhood venues outside home and office - are under pressure from changes in work and social interaction.
Boundaries between the different places have become hopelessly blurred in the internet era, it says. The importance of "non-places" (eg, social networking sites) has grown rapidly. And if things were not already bad enough for the genuine third-place pub, it also faces competition from the "fourth place" - typically a themed pub, which replicates the third place, commodifying its identity for those who want to indulge occasionally, without any of the authenticity.
As the IPA essay says of this trend: "Fourth places, while appearing to provide a temporary solution to the loss of place in the emerging postmodern geography, are ultimately inadequate due to their dislocation from community." This is not something you'll hear from the Vintners Federation when it laments the downturn in the drinks trade. But pending the rise of a fifth place, which will probably wipe them out altogether, it appears that the only hope for traditional Irish pubs is to embrace the new reality, in which work and leisure are mixed up.
Henceforward, as well as soup and sandwiches, every bar will need to offer Wifi, technical support, and other facilities for nomadic workers. Coffee will be important too. Drink may eventually be just an optional extra.
THERE WAS an interesting feature in the Economist recently about the new "nomadism", which is apparently defining 21st-century architecture.
Frank Gehry has already led the way with a building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose keynote is "hybrid space". Rather than separate places of work and play, cafés and lounges are interspersed with desks and "whiteboards" - so that, at any time, the building's users are "cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing" in the same general area.
Cubicles are out in the new architecture. But "nooks and crannies" are in, catering for the natural human desire to have one's back to a wall while working. Curvature is therefore a big feature, maximising interior wall-space, rather like a body's "intestines".
(It's unfortunate that this new architectural movement arrived too late for the old Irish Times headquarters, now being demolished. Although any curvature of the walls there was accidental, it wasn't unusual to get lost in the labyrinthine corridors, while searching for - say - the credit union office. Frequently we used to refer to something being in the "bowels" of the building, little realising this would be Frank Gehry's next big idea.)
Another recent response to nomadism, according to the Economist, is a new office park in Michigan, which is "more like a community centre". Instead of letting to corporate tenants, the developer plans to sell memberships by the hour, week or month, offering mobile workers everything from technical back-up and copying facilities to fitness studios, restaurants, and "music rooms".
Meanwhile, back in the third place, Wifi-enabled cafés are beginning to reverse an imbalance whereby nomadic workers have taken them over. To reintroduce a social element, some now have jazz evenings, or poetry readings, or even switch the wifi off occasionally.
At least one US café is going further, transforming itself into a social networking site by asking laptop users to complete a short profile when signing in - as on Facebook - and then giving them access to similarly-sourced information about people at other tables.
Welcome to the new neighbourhood, coming to a traditional pub near you soon. In future, when you drop in for a pint, you will log on to find out who everybody else is. After discovering from his profile that the guy next to you is the pub bore, you will hastily move, sitting instead beside that attractive women who is pretending to be reading an online magazine but whose profile suggests she could use some sugar.
Perhaps you will be stuck for words. But don't worry. All you have to do is look up your local authority's European Neighbours' Day website and there you'll find the advice you need in black and white, viz: "Just say hello."