The closing of public places is a real trend, and not just with the closing of 'bistro'. Many places people could freely gather publicly are vanishing. As mentioned in another comment already, and I agree: this weakens society dramatically.
I live in Paris and have been for decades, I've seen how the city has changed making it always harder to be outside in the city (it's also harder to 'be inside', to own a place to live in Paris, but that's not the point).
I mean, in a city we can go to many places, obviously. Say, we can to work and back to home, do errands, go to art gallery or to a doctor, and so on. As for Paris, It's also as touristic as it ever was, with many places to go visit and to take pictures of. But there is less and less places where people can just be together. Even public benches are less and less usable, making it less an option to use them to meet and/or to start chatting with other people. The street is turning into a mere mean of communication, to move from point A to point B, and quickly stops being the place where people used to live. It's even more obvious in Paris, which used to not be like that much.