I think the big winner in the short-term is places like YMCA attempting to broaden into more and more social categories.
> entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet
This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another. I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space. When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
> I think the big winner in the short-term is places like YMCA attempting to broaden into more and more social categories.
I might be missing something. You're making it sound like there is some short term or new phenomenon happening here. COVID certainly has not been the cause of the decline of community cohesiveness, and certainly not behind any rise in demand for people "sharing spaces" with strangers.
> This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another.
Well I disagree with that characterization that it's a problem or that a solution would be to spend vast amounts of money on it. As I said, people don't want to share spaces.
The "problem" is not lack of shared space. If you don't like the lack of community or people willing to share and invest in their shared spaces, the root cause is completely different. A top-down decree of more will not fix it.
> I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space.
Parks are one thing that can work if they are quite remote or highly policed or in "good areas", but that's because people tend to go there for few reasons, there isn't much in the way of infrastructure or services to be ruined or hogged or stolen.
I don't see many people working, cooking, or gardening in shared spaces though. Sure there are some college kids, occasional professional who takes their laptop there for a few hours to work, sometimes people will have a BBQ and there is the odd community garden project. But even with the meager parks there are, I don't see a lot of them overflowing for places to sit and work.
> When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
Dangerously bordering on anti diversity wrongthink... but true. However increasing space doesn't really help all that much when there is a lot of crime and not enough resources to police it.
> entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet
This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another. I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space. When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.