Ytring
Where will we meet tomorrow?
- The idea of getting a double cappuccino is what gets me up in the morning and through the twenty-minute commute from home to work, even on the coldest, greyest days.
Dette er en ytring. Innholdet i teksten uttrykker forfatterens mening.
There is a Rebecca Solnit quote that says everything we can save is worth saving. This past month, several passionate and reasonable appeals have been made to NTNU and SiT to save the Dragvoll café, a place dear to many.
Students have made urgent appeals, frequent visitors have shared their favourite orders, a QR code for a signature campaign now greets you at the entrance, and professors with access to institutional knowledge and economic models have laid out concrete alternatives.
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The decision-makers surely know this is a place people care for and return to in their campus lives. So, as Solnit reminds us, saving reflects what we value, what does it say about SiT’s priorities if a space like the Dragvoll café does not count as worth saving?
That question is easier to answer if you actually look at the place itself. Allow me to take you through what the Dragvoll café means in practice.
Every day at 8am, like many others, I come to the café like a punctual scholar. The idea of getting a double cappuccino is what gets me up in the morning and through the twenty-minute commute from home to work, even on the coldest, greyest days.
For many like me, who rely on social networks or come from countries where community forms a central axis of everyday life, the café offers exactly that. It begins with the warmest smiles on the other side of the counter.
Sometimes it becomes a safe space to practise ordering in Norwegian, and just as often it becomes a place to have a lingering chat with the barista before you realise you’re holding up the line. Other days, you know there is a good deal to be secured. Tuesday cookie, Wednesday cinnamonbun, a Thursday scone and a Friday cake!
As the morning grows, people drift in and out. Someone stops by for a quick catch-up between lectures, another for a meeting that felt too urgent, or too human, to be reduced to an email. Soon conversations spill across tables, half work, half life with laptops opened and attentions divided.
You’d find many who linger longer than planned because they bumped into someone. Over time, you start recognising faces with routines that mirror your own, the kind of familiarity that only comes from sharing the same place, day after day.
In urban planning we call a place like SIT dragvoll a Third space. It means a shared setting where everyday social life takes shape through informal encounters and routine presence that helps builds a sense of community.
These spaces form part of the social infrastructure that sustains communal life on campus. When they are removed, the social fabric of the campus thins as routines become more individualised and shared points of reference disappear. For students and staff at Dragvoll, this means fewer places to meet and linger in ways that make us part of a shared daily rhythm.
The worst is already being anticipated. A colleague who knows where to find me during the first hours of the workday asked recently, where would I start my day once the SiT café shuts down? I don’t have an answer. The café has long functioned as an agreed-upon place, a default answer built into the daily routines of many of us at Dragvoll. Without it something ordinary and important disappears. Where will we meet tomorrow?
