 Working at the café? 
Cafés are locally-anchored meeting places that are now heavily populated with people working on laptops. In tandem with this phenomenon, we have recently seen the arrival of new, work specific, “coworking” café spaces. How do these two types of cafés differ in terms of their social and territorial vocations ? Based on observations of clients at these two different types of Montreal cafés, as well as semi-directed interviews with their owners and staff, our research showed that cafés remain a neighbourhood centred, multi-functional place for socialization. Single function coworking cafés, on the other hand, are more like offices with a territorial boundary that is difficult to ascertain. These differences question the limits of the notion of third places and emphasize the geographical aspects of traditional cafés, making them third places which are distinct from other types of spaces as we currently define them.