Third spaces: What do we want, and how do we get them?
Given some other very strong and interesting discussion on male loneliness recently (I'm intentionally not linking to avoid adding to drama or bringing that tension here), I thought I'd try and spark a discussion on what I see as a major problem that addresses male loneliness significantly without digging into the thorniness of gender norms and responsibilities: the death of third spaces.
There has been a decent amount of writing on the fact that third spaces - spaces that are not home or work where people can meet, hang out and build community - have been disappearing since at least the 90s (and really going extinct since Covid), and that we need to actively recreate them. But I have not yet seen any proposal that I think could be easily replicated and addresses the core needs that third spaces address. In fact, I haven't even seen any agreed-upon definition of what an ideal third space is, or what specific needs they should address!
So, let's talk about it. In no particular priority or order:
- What are some third spaces you enjoy or fondly remember?
- What are the key features of third spaces to you? Do they need to be free, or just low enough cost that people can join in relatively easily?
- What key needs should a good third space address?
- Who should run them? The government? Community groups? For-profit?
- Are there any groups or initiatives that have shown a good formula for re-creating third spaces across their communities?
- How do we ensure people are motivated to join third spaces? We aren't going to get really lonely, isolated people out just by opening up doors most of the time.
The thing is that third spaces haven’t been disappearing since the ‘90s. The 90s were the absolute nadir, but the types of spaces that were third places have exploded since then. There’s been a huge resurgence of cocktail culture, microbrews, and third wave coffee. There’s been an explosion of casual groups via Meetups, social sports leagues, interesting restaurants, and a bunch of other types of places and activities that were where people used to hang out.
What’s actually changed is that home also just got harder to leave, so people stopped hanging out. Being at home no longer just means having your personal library of media and the selection of periodicals you subscribe to. It means having all the streaming media, all the porn, video games, dating apps, and so on.
Third spaces are all over the place, it’s the social structures that have atrophied. People think nothing of changing plans at the last minute now, people don’t commit to social appointments. Flaking on commitments has lost much of its taboo and a lot of the occasions where people used to connect interpersonally have turned into things that require a lot more intention and deliberate effort expended instead of just being incidental.
I’ll give an example. I was chatting with another dad at school drop off the other day and somehow we got on the topic of a The Green Knight and he mentioned there’s a new translation by a German author. 15-20 years ago I’d have given him my email and asked him to send me the name when he remembers it. Today, I googled it and found it and what may have been an opportunity for us to randomly get to know each other turned into a dry and efficient information gathering exercise. It’s not even that I couldn’t have tried if I wanted to talk more about the subject with him, that’s not my point. My point is that in the past the easiest way for me to learn more about the topic of our conversation would be to find another occasion to continue the conversation. But today there is a much easier and lower friction way to do the same that provides immediate gratification. This has happened everywhere, in numerous human endeavors, and it’s sandblasted away all the points of friction where we actually connected with each other. It’s not the lack of places to hang out, it’s that not hanging out is too easy while making plans and sticking to them remains hard!
My wife have started to say "friends are inconvenient." And on its surface it's both true and depressing. But we use it as shorthand to say "the inconvenience of socialization is not the point, but is an understood cost that is still dwarfed by the joys that come with social interaction." People are inconvenient. An AI friend will provide a frictionless and unsurprising facsimile of friendship, but to get the joys of real interactions, accept the friction as well.
I like this a lot. The very fact that I count someone as a friend, means I am happy to be inconvenienced by my friend's interactions with me. And I am their friend, meaning, I recognize that I am not merely tolerated as an inconvenience but am welcomed for it. This is a bit of a mental game changer for me.
Right? I hate inconveniencing people. But it's part of being human. Friendship includes friction. A perfect friendship/relationship isn't one that is never difficult at all, it's one that brings joy and continues to be worth it despite the challenges. So when you're the difficult one, accept it and try to be better. Don't retreat, improve.
This is a great discussion thread and I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments very much!
It's probably futile to look for a specific "ideal" definition of a third place. That will have enough disclaimers and caveats as to defeat the purpose of being universal. Lived experience is subjective: everyone has different reasons to want a third place, and everyone experiences the same places differently.
We informally refer to the concept in negative ("something other than home [privacy] and work [capital]"), which tells us what the cultural impetus is, but if you're looking for a positive definition, start from the beginning: Oldenburg's 1989 book The Great Good Place originally articulated the concept of third places (he didn't use the term "third spaces"). The Wikipedia page on third places lists the characteristics he published:
I'd emphasize that these are principles; they are not, by themselves, atomic or clearly actionable. This is because they are subjective feelings and not immutable qualities per se. The implication is that these feelings are emergent rather than pre-defined. Therefore, you're not going to find a deterministic formula or algorithm to "recreate" third places in a consistent way across geographies, cultures, time periods, and other contexts.
What I think you're really asking is: "What deterministic algorithm can we follow to create the conditions for the feelings we associate with successful third places to arise?"
I'm getting into the weeds, but it's important to distinguish the construction of the environment of the third place from its realization (experience). Creating basic gathering spaces is essentially a solved problem: you need a physical space or medium, an incentive to use this space to gather, and people to use it. That could be a few logs arranged in a circle; the prerequisites are almost nonexistent. Centuries of urban planning, architecture, interior design, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines have taught us how to improve the incentives to use third spaces relative to other incentives in society (like incentives of absolute privacy at home, or incentives to earn money or status at work), which is why we might be tempted to think that third places are complex to build and operate (Greek agora, English public houses, Parisian cafés, etc.).
However, the brilliance of third places is that they elude strict categorization. Human community forms in unexpected ways. The most humble places can emergently attain this mythic status because of what they mean to us, not because of how they were constructed. All the self-evident (to you and I) types of third places present socially acceptable, easily replicable models: churches, coffee shops, assembly halls for dancing, public parks, etc. But I encourage you to look beyond the obvious ones to see my point. Abandoned piles of scrap metal, decaying buildings, and desolate architectural void spaces aren't paradigms of community that respectable society would try to replicate as third places (for many reasons!), but those can nevertheless become meaningful to wild teenagers, counter-cultural artists, and the like. The New York City subway wasn't meant to be a social space and yet it has developed a unique culture: specific commutes are a sort of transient-but-permanent third place. Tildes and other online communities might even be considered a kind of postmodern third space.
The practical question of how to build more "normal" third places for society proper, within the arbitrary limitations society has established for itself, is today a matter of revising policies around land use/zoning, property taxes, liability insurance, incorporation or fiscal sponsorship, and our culture of apathy/convenience, among other things. We have produced systems of regulation that make it relatively challenging to build the kinds of mainstream third places that best utilize our aforementioned centuries of expertise in incentives. This is boring—and expensive! Of course some rules are more reasonable than others.
If you want to make it systemically easier to create more third places, the lowest-hanging fruit is probably to relax restrictive use-based (Euclidean) zoning laws, pedestrianize town squares and central corridors, and implement other kinds of universal design in the built environment. This is because physical access is perhaps the most fundamental requirement of third places. Challenging the "formalization of fun"—the defensive bureaucracy society has established around organizational lawsuits and liability, especially in the USA—would reduce the costs of literally operating some third places, but this seems less actionable by laypeople. Broad cultural change, or incentivizing people to just spend more time in third places rather than at home or at work, is probably more easily influenced by the previous factors than through rhetorical persuasion.
To ask what my librarian wife would ask, especially as people will bring up cost:
Why aren't you going to your local library?
Can only speak to my personal experiences
Most importantly there’s no actual spaces for talking. I know some libraries may have these kind of areas but the libraries near me are all serious reading only. If you were to chitchat with friends you’d get kicked out.
Secondly the hours suck - they mostly coincide with work hours, which isn’t very helpful for a space outside of work.
Third, this is probably a local quirk, but they’re weirdly exclusive? Not only is the general public not allowed in, but I can’t even go the closest library I live to because it’s technically in a different county and they only let people who live in that county have a library card. Obviously a bit of a buzzkill if your friends live in different areas.
Third, there’s no food or drinks allowed. Fair, but also kinda a buzzkill for hanging out.
Something I tell people over and over around where I live, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, is that all the metro area library systems here offer to link up your "home system" card with their systems. So I just take my normal library card to the front desk of a library in another system, they link it to their system, and then I'm free to use that card in both systems. I believe this includes at least 7 different systems (a huge geographical area); i have three systems. In each system, I believe my book limit is 100 at a time. The systems are completely separate, just the card works for each. This is awesome for going with kids to new libraries.
And, without even doing the link process, you can drop off books from any system at any library and they'll make it back to the right place. So I can go to a far-flung library once, check out a book, and not worry about having to go back.
Sorry to hear that isn't the case in your area. "general public not allowed in" is insane.
I’ve never heard of such a thing.
I have lived all over the US and haven’t ever seen any kind of physical barriers to entry when a library is open. Yes it’s easier to get a card in some places than it is others, but you should always be able to read a book in the building and hang out as long as you like (during open hours, of course). One city had a lot of unhoused folks come in out of the rain and cold. It was inconvenient for other patrons, but they were allowed to stay. During Covid, these same people were welcomed into city libraries, given masks and food. I doubt most had library cards, as you need an id or utility bill to get one and it’s difficult to hang onto an id in an environment where they are often stolen when one sleeps.
I was living out of my car last year, and yeah, libraries are the place to go during the day. In the places I have been, the problem I encountered is libraries haven't been open on Sundays, sometimes have limited hours on Saturdays and Fridays. It's one of the challenges of being unhoused but relying on the library for shelter during the day is the limited hours. Other people who were in the city's shelter system would basically go from the shelter in the morning since they weren't all-day shelters, to the library during the day, and back to the shelter at night, which works better when the schedules line up but is especially hard when they don't.
There was one library that I went to where they had something like what airports have where if your baggage doesn't fit in the box then it's too big to bring in, but as far as I can tell, they didn't enforce it. I believe that to be something anti-homeless, because homeless people have nowhere else to store their belongings and even myself though I was living out of a car and could keep my belongings in there while going into the library, I still would bring in a lot to the library when I'm in there all day. They never stopped me or made me verify my bags fit in that box, which they wouldn't have on some occasions. Of course some people who don't have a car to store their things in did bring in way more than I was bringing in and it could feel a bit excessive with the amount of space they would take up, but I understand both sides of the problem.
There were some services that were restricted to cardholders. One library had a gaming area, like a couch and chairs and gaming consoles and what not, but the sign said it required a library card to utilize. Makerspaces that I saw also required a library card. But indeed books and what not there was no such restriction to read them while inside the library.
I do think that people ought to be aware of homeless populations to some extent when considering 3rd spaces because it's possibly a problem for some areas, even if it's not representative of the overall experience that may exist for every potential 3rd space. If you make a place where people can go that doesn't cost money, homeless people don't have many options and are likely to be drawn to such a place. The vast majority of options in my experience last year is basically libraries are the only place you can truly go and not be expected to pay money, you can get away with going into some retail places or malls and walk around for free without having to pay. Most of the seating options I saw in the few malls I went in were quite intentionally not meant to be utilized for extended time and were quite uncomfortable.
Edit: Should clarify that I'm of course only talking about indoor places, as there's parks and some other areas for outdoor spaces.
The libraries in my county have had spurts of movement in this direction. One of my favorites was a period when one of the branches hosted a makerspace in a large (otherwise storage) room. The makerspace had scheduled classes, but also had open times when kids (and technically adults) could hang out and work on personal projects. Space is money though, and money decisions eventually crowded the makerspace out. But the fact that there was enough support to keep it open for several years is encouraging.
...hours, mostly, but also restrictions on boistrous activity...
My local library doesn't have a public toilet which makes it a pretty poor place to visit for long. There's a decent selection of books for young children but I can't spend time there with my four-year-old because he'll need the toilet.
It’s always closed when I want to go!
Libraries in my city are amazing. Future focused community hubs where all activities are present - even smoking meth in the bathroom!
That said, they're still awesome
There's a pub in my area that has an activity every night of the week. Music, dancing, poetry, trivia, local bands, you name it. For years I'd go dancing there weekly, and met a lot of people. Because you could get a drink, or food, or nothing and just enjoy the activity, lots of people showed up regularly. It was good times, and as my health improves enough to go dancing again, I'm going to go back.
I think that "free" in this context can only mean "free at point of entry." Every venue needs money to maintain the facilities at the very least. Even if it's happening in an empty dirt lot, somebody's got to pay something along the way. I do think that it being a sliding scale fee is good, or supported by voluntary donations, so that people who want to come and can't pay aren't excluded.
A third space provides the opportunity for community. A place for fortuitous happenstance, where you run into friends, or make new ones. A place to find common ground on shared issues, to get a perspective you might not have considered. A place where there are no hosts and guests, but people together sharing something.
I think that they should be run by people who care about the community. This doesn't exclude for-profit organizations, but definitely constrains the kinds and sizes of business that can do it. A pub with a single location that's been run by the same family for 100 years? They care about the community. An international firm? They're detached from any one neighborhood.
As far as drawing people in, you've gotta offer something that people want to do first and foremost, and then the people will come. There can't be "the third place" advertised in a vacuum without any activities. Whether it's something to eat or do or experience, with a more robust urban fabric and diversity of experiences comes more reasons for people to get out and do something of interest. And that in turn leads to community and connection.
Great example! I wish I had one of those pubs near where I live. I agree that a third place has to have stuff to do to draw people in. I also think in general they should be run by people who care about the community too, but how do you think we make it easier to generate more of them then? It's a pretty tiny subset of our societies right now that has the time, money, and motivation to host something like that for the greater good.
If we can agree that they need to be funded, there's three ways there can be more third spaces. The government can run them through infrastructure development to provide gathering places and ongoing funding to care for and run them, a for-profit entity can create and maintain one with the expectation that it'll increase their revenues more than it costs to maintain, or a non-profit can provide and run one (though it'll probably be in infrastructure built by one of the other two unless your local Masons, Shriners, or other old school social club has a hall that's available for other purposes.)
Note that all three of those cases have something in common: infrastructure. For there to be a third place, there must first be a place. And both governmental and for-profit organizations mostly haven't been prioritizing public infrastructure since the New Deal a century ago. So it's another one of those things where we talk about it as if it's something individuals can change while ignoring the choices regarding our built environment that makes our individual choices for us. In the current US, where governments at every level are hamstrung by competing for the lowest tax rates in the vain hope of drawing businesses to them and where businesses broadly want to extract as much value as possible for the minimum investment, no one is likely to build what would make third places easy.
I don't know what the solution is for society. As it is, I try to throw minimal-pressure potlucks with a broad range of times people are welcome to show up and no requirement to contribute, go to social events in person and support the businesses that make those events possible, and advocate for higher tax rates and better politicians to perhaps one day have a local government that doesn't just act like they're there to provide a minimally disruptive workforce for whatever corporation will whisper sweet nothings into their ear.
I have a local game store that has a room to the side where they encourage folks to bring in other games or play D&D or the like. They sell snacks but people regularly bring in some food and sit for a while. Obviously they prefer if you buy some things there but I've been meeting with some friends to play games almost every week for the last several years and we usually spend just a couple of dollars each time.
They also host tournaments, events for children, they organize movie nights when a nerdy movie is playing in the theaters, and generally provide a place for some of those same lonely people to come hang out for a while. I appreciate them greatly.
A new game store opened up in late fall last year and I've been going there ever since. They have daily activities (Pokemon TCG, Magic, WH40k, D&D, etc.) and it's otherwise pretty open to whatever as long as there's a table open. It's been really nice having a local group of nerds to hang out with, because despite living in my current town for over a decade now I previously didn't have any local friends. Just family and friends who were a bit of a drive to get to (or online).
My younger years were spent either in a very rural part of the country (nowhere to go close by) or in a city, but too consumed with making sure my employment was secure, so by the time I started to develop something resembling a social life, these places had mostly already disappeared (and the pandemic acted as the final nail). So I can only engage on a theoretical level, but with that said…
My theory is that if we combat the forces that made third places dry up in the first place, they’ll organically re-appear over time, and even if they don’t doing this will greatly improve the chances of coordinated efforts to establish third places taking root and remaining healthy long-term.
Some of the forces at work, to my knowledge:
I dont really think there is a lack of third spaces, there are lots of parks and libraries and public squares and such. Its just that people arent there.
When I hear talk about the need for third spaces it usually sounds like people wanting a place they can go to meet new people and make friends. Which requires a bunch of other people decide to start frequenting those particular free spaces and turning it into a social venue.
I think what is really lacking is a cultural norm of just going to hang out with strangers. Thats not a common thing to do, its more a thing you do when you need to fix a lack of friendships in your life, and then you are done with it.
I agree with you there.
My experiences point to two different things happening simultaneously: the disappearance of third spaces, and the retreat from semi-non-optional shoulder rubbing with strangers.
There might be overlap, but here are some examples of where they don't:
Third Space:
the empty lot, the back hills, the woods, the ball park, the mall: for kids/teens to hang out without spending money.
The pub, he bowling alley, the dart hall, the golf club: where adults hang out while spending some money.
The volunteering venue, where people do a work-like activity with the same set of people that resemble co-workers.
The sign up: thing we pay for or join free, voluntarily, for a common purposes like extracurricular or lessons or chess club etc
Semi-non-optional stranger filled places:
The difference between A and B is something we choose to do in our spare time vs something that's not our choice and is part of life. Now....as a terminally online introvert I'm *thrilled that nearly all B's have been entirely eliminated, and I pay extra to turn what little of B remains into exclusive / private affairs. But .... I will admit that I have less social cohesion as a result: it's easier and preferred, but there is a cumulative cost to it.
If agree - it's not as of third places don't exist.
All over the world, people with a drive to congregate find a patch of grass, a public square or a landmark to do whatever it is they want to do.
Part of this is that their homes don't support the activity they're looking to do, but the other part (the major part) is that so many more activities are deemed acceptable in public.
I used to practice Capoeira, an activity where a bunch of people make a circle, play instruments and fart around for hours. There are so many things wrong with this kind activity in a North American context.
At worst, all of the above might be grounds for concerned citizens to call law enforcement. At best, the activity is treated as a spectacle or performance for passers by rather than just a group of people doing an activity together in a public space.
TLDR: people are weird and conservative about how to behave in public, and as a result, the public forum is full of nervous, judgey energy.
...used to be that public schools provided a commons for all manner of vibrant community activity, both indoors and outdoors, but they've been locked-down and systematically defunded this century...even public parks now require fees for organised activity and chase off disorganised loitering in the name of security...
I recall being able to talk into my old schools and just pace around. Like, not as an adult but as a former student, you could just walk in and say hi to your former teachers. I'm sad that my daughter won't have the freedom to revisit past parts of her life in the same way.
I remember former students would drop by to say hi when I was in school. I tried to do the same and stop by and say hi to my former high school teachers after I graduated from college and had a bit of time while I was in town visiting my parents. The receptionist told me they no longer allowed that, and I wouldn't be able to do that without first setting up an appointment with the teacher.
Man, you touch on something larger that's just not around anymore: the "drop in". My parents lament the fact that unlike their parents who would just show up on a Saturday and expect a visit, that they're not really allowed to do it with their kids.
The *drop in *, as annoying as it could be, was a chance to get together at a person's house. For our teachers, it was a chance to see the old classroom, walk the halls and connect with them as people.
It's a damn shame. I find myself leveling blame at social media and instant messaging more and more for today's ills, and I'll do it again.
Many don't know what was lost because they never experienced it in the first place.
One of the things I loved when I was in university was that drop in mentality. This was in part due to living in a fraternity chapter house where we would have ~30-40 guys living in the house, but there could also at any time be another ~30-40 guys who are members who would stop by throughout the day/week and then their friends as well. Going downstairs you would run in to different people all the time. This extended to "live out" houses where a group of members who didn't live in the chapter house would rent a house in town together. As long as you were close to those guys you would often stop by unannounced at (almost) any time of the day, and since it was a college town a lot of doors were left unlocked, or you knew how to get in with a spare key located somewhere. There was a group of guys who rented a house that was on the way to campus from the chapter house, and you'd often find guys hanging out there playing some video games (usually Smash Bros Melee) or chatting in between classes when they didn't want to take the extra ~5+ minutes to walk back to the house when they needed to be back on campus in another hour.
Post graduation we lived far enough away from anyone we knew that dropping in just didn't make sense to do since it could be a 15-60 minute drive over there.
When we moved to Malaysia I ended up living down the street from my in-laws, so we would have drop ins happen almost daily. We're out for a walk, might as well stop by and see what they're doing, or they would be coming back from errand, might as well stop by and see the grandkids and hang out for 20-30 minutes. Now that we've moved away from them, we've started missing that since we only know a couple of people nearby, and they aren't as close to just stop by whenever.
I remember talking with you about frat life before.
It's so interesting and I'm happy to have a window into the positive contributions of fraternities and sororities when the public discourse about them is often negative.
I lived in similar 'student houses' and absolutely see the experience gaps among those who spent their college years living with their parents.
I wouldn't trade the freedom and comradery of years for anything.
I try not to bring it up too often here, since I don't want to be known as the guy who spends too much time reminiscing about his university days. That being said, I had some great experiences during my time as an active member and felt it was overall a huge positive influence on me as a person, and I've found it relevant to some discussions here. I'm happy to chat about it with people since not everyone is as familiar with it (10% of college students in the US become members of a fraternity or sorority, but there are also 1/3 of college students whose campuses don't have Greek life organizations from a quick Google search), and it's something I'm still passionate about (though as involved in given my move across the world).
I had written a long comment talking about benefits of it while also acknowledging some of the negatives for the recent male loneliness thread and why I think encouraging young men who are on college campuses to join could help combat loneliness, but I opted to not post it since that thread got a bit heated at times and my comment was very meandering and not focused.
Yeah, probably wise. For some reason the topic of.male loneliness sets people off.
It's a long transition now that I have kids, but I'm looking forward to pursuing shared living as a focus once I'm able to make my next career leap. I have my graduate degree in the field and made the topic a focus of my studies in hopes that I could do something about it one day.
Co-living is awesome and I wish that more of our zoning laws made it into an attractive living option for people in and outside of college.
I paid a visit to my high school after about a year in university. The teachers I did get to say hi to were thrilled and pleasantly surprised.
With university professors, I had 2-3 I kept in touch for several years after. One with whom I had coffee 2-3 times a year for a good while. Then I moved cities. I felt this was already not common, and I’m talking 15 years ago. It’s probably even less common now.
The drop-in! I remember that when I was a kid some of the relatives would simply appear. Spend a bit of time (coffee, maybe a meal) and go. Particularly my grandfather. I didn’t like the visits much because almost always he would argue about politics with my dad and I hated seeing them in those heated debates. My mom had to assure me it’s normal and they still love each other.
More recently a friend down the street assured me I can drop by anytime (say, while I walk my dog). I tried a couple of times, but I still felt weird. Like I’m in the way of their dinner prep or some yard work. Maybe he was trying to be nice and didn’t ACTUALLY expect the drop-in?
It's such a strange thing these days that no matter the intentions, I bet it'd always be weird. It makes me wonder whether the weirdness comes from people not having the time to just drop everything and hang.
Like, did they just make space back then or did they just have nothing pressing to do?
Maybe they prioritized people more. Or they still did things while people visited. My mom would still be doing chores as my grandfather hung out and argued about politics with my dad. Not to mention she’d usually be the one cooking for everyone. Not exactly fair to her.
Could some of the weirdness I feel be one sided and in my own head? I believe I am inconveniencing the friend I visit as he’s chatting with me while also prepping to grill some chicken for dinner in the back yard. I’m thinking “I better wrap this up soon and get out of his hair.” But maybe he’s already thinking “I’ll add some extra chicken and have him for dinner if he wants.” Maybe too much focus on what each of us believes is correct and polite versus just going with the flow.
I think you're right on all accounts.
Mom probably did everything so that dads could play. It's just how things were, hence not being vocal about whether she wanted to or not
Yes, we could be more easy going in our space. It occurs to me that for repeat visitors, they'd either help out if they were good guests or sit around and drink the family's beer if they weren't good guests.
Whatever the truth of it, age probably played a massive role in our ability to see what was actually going on, and our ability to remember things without rose coloured glasses.
I personally find that third spaces work best for me if socializing isn't actually the point, strange as that may seem. There needs to be a draw to keep me coming back even while I barely know anyone.
In my experience, dog parks are a good example of a third space. People will tend to take their dogs to the park even if no one else is there (which means it won't just fizzle out, like social meetups often do). But when other people do show up, it tends to be the same people over and over again, and they become your friends after a while.
I think we need more public facilities like these — particularly oriented toward small, local communities. Every neighborhood should have a playground, every neighborhood should have a dog park, every neighborhood should have a library, every neighborhood should have some public grills and picnic tables, every neighborhood should have a safe place to jog and cycle, etc. These get people interfacing with each other.
They don't need to be big or fancy. And actually, I think we should be aiming for quantity over quality as much as possible; everyone should live within easy walking distance of a handful of different public facilities like these, and they should aim to serve a very small number of people so that it's the same people interfacing with each other over and over again. Familiarity is how you create community, and a community doesn't need to be big at all.
This resonates with me a lot, especially as someone who has always lacked great social skills - I'm typically very poor at freeform small talk and socialization. My favorite third places recently have been pickup soccer (coordinated via an app) and rock climbing gyms. There are always opportunities to talk to people, but there is zero pressure to do so.
Sometimes I do strike up conversation which makes the experience more fun, but I more-so enjoy these third spaces because it's comforting to be around a group of strangers all working at similar goals for their own enjoyment. There's something very special and inspiring about that.
After recently going through a difficult breakup and various life changes, third spaces have become the largest contributor to my mental healing.
If you ever get the opportunity, I'd also recommend getting into activities that involve direct cooperation with other people. Something like volunteering with Habitat for Humanity comes to mind.
When I immigrated overseas to a town country town (~2700 people), I didn't know anybody other than my partner, and I had a hard time fitting in with the local culture because we just didn't have any kind of shared history, we often had trouble parsing each other's dialects, and the culture here can be pretty standoffish and reserved (at least compared to what I'm used to).
But I got a job working on a farm, and a lot of that work was highly cooperative. To replace the plastic on greenhouses, we needed 10+ people all coordinating to get the plastic in just the right position and secure it evenly with spring clips while fighting against the wind (the plastic acted like a sail once we got it up off the ground). On big harvest days, we had to work assembly-line style to get everything done quickly and to minimize mistakes, and even the office workers would get pulled in; it was all hands on deck. Even on smaller daily tasks, we'd often have to coordinate activities in pairs or trios; there was very little truly solo work.
It was an incredible bonding experience. You naturally specialize into your particular strengths and talents, people respect you and want your help, and you feel like you're part of something. Despite being a huge introvert and homebody, within a year of starting that job, I really started feeling like I was meaningfully part of a community, and other people in the town (even strangers I'd never met before) started treating me like I was one of the locals — as if I'd lived here my whole they and they all knew who my parents and grandparents were. I don't think this would have happened, at least not as quickly, if I'd gotten an office job instead.
I would love to see Marijuana smoking lounges (I'm Canadian).
So something resembling a 'Chuck-E-Cheese' but for adults, somewhere to chill and relax with some friends, smoke some bowls (or whatever). I picture that scene in Hackers (1995) where they are in some sort of club/arcade with roller blades discussing computer security books lol.
If there was some way for that place not to reek of weed, I'd love it. Unfortunately it sounds like hell. Bars often feel the same way (not even counting the cost and expectation of spending money). Dave and Busters - adult ChuckECheese - is ok but I haven't been in a while and I'm not sure the cost.
Not wanting to be in those spaces makes trivia nights and board game nights and such hard. But we have a few other spaces like our local game store and libraries and such. It's just hard to find wheelchair accessible spaces that aren't our home. Visiting friends isn't really an option.
It should be possible. I’ve been in a handful of indoor cigar bars that smell like fresh air. Most reek, but the air scrubber technology does exist.
Weed smell travels farther and lingers longer than tobacco (at least based on when it got legalized here), so it depends a lot on how much that affects the scrubbing. People who smoke tend to be the worst judges of whether something smells like it.
I don't know, I've been around a lot of cannabis and in my experience people who smoke it don't think they smell like it.
This isn't moralizing or anything I just really hate the smell. Cigarettes are also pretty bad but far less common indoors these days.
I don't smoke at all, though everyone here seems to think I do 🙂
I don't have any opinion on whether you smoke or not? And didn't express one. I was not commenting on you, but on how nothing seems to adequately remove the smell. College students have been trying for decades. And they have no idea if it works.
Ah, I misunderstood.
Coffee shops in Amsterdam had a good thing going when it comes to weed sales and activities to go with them.
Not sure where you're at with other drugs, but as a Canadian, you owe it to yourself to check out our multi day festival scene. It's all Chuck -E-Cheese, all night long!
Shambhala vet 2010-2016.
Ahhh, that right there! '05 -'10 for me. It's chaos, but probably the wildest one we have.
Personally, I like the smaller ones these days.
Fellow Canadian here. I was hoping that once they legalized it we’d see some venues like what you’re describing or at least like the coffee shops in Amsterdam.
For a couple of years after legalization a friend and I walked our dogs together at least once a week and smoked a joint in the park (third space!). It fizzled once he got busy with kids and I got a more demanding job.
My idea is really unrealistic, I cannot see us going back to a world where we allow smoking (of anything) inside a business where workers have no choice but to inhale the secondhand smoke. I'm just dreaming here :)
It could be one of those establishments where the window side is like large garage doors and the open fully in the summer, into a large patio area with couch-booths around coffee tables, separated by cubicle-wall height walls on top of which are many plants. Basically green/natural walls. Under each coffee table is a storage cabinet with fun things. Beautiful books / photo books, magazines, random toys (squishy stress balls, etc), some EASY games, pen and paper if creativity strikes you and you want to draw...
3rd spaces are lacking for teenagers, not adults. My teenagers can go to a park, until dusk or friends houses, that's it. The rec center closes at 6. There are restaurants and bars, but only the pizza place and ice cream shop is within the price range of a teenager. And the ice cream shop doesnt have tables.
I remember we had a bar/cafe in town that had live music, open mic nights, comedians, etc in a corner, plenty of tables with comfy chairs and board games. My friends and I would go there, play a game while sipping tea, coffee or soda and eat a dessert. When we'd play chess, adults would come over, watch and offer tips. It was great
That's what I want, a chill place where adults and teenagers can coexist. Where people can relax, chat, have a beverage, treat or simple meal.some live music, open mic night, poetry, improv, comedians, etc can have a small performance space.
I think the main issue for teen spaces is cost, since they usually have a lot less money at their disposal, and I know I definitely couldn't afford to spend more than the cost of a coffee for something like this.
College campuses are full of third spaces and could be a place to learn from, but it's because most of those spaces are free for students because they're covered by their tuition and fees. Or they're communal dining that the student needs to use anyway because the university requires a meal plan or they simply don't have a kitchen.
I think people would be more motivated to spend time at third places if they didn't have second best versions of everything at home.
Why go to the theatre when I have a big screen? Why go out for a great coffee when I can do espresso at home? Why play basketball with my pals when I can just jam out to Counterstrike and have a great time? Meet at the mall? Bro, there's way better, cheaper stuff on Amazon.
Social media, texting and the many ways we can hang out with each other from our own homes was really the missing ingredient for pushing people further away from IRL meet ups. It makes good enough the primary pass time for society at large.
I'm not going to be too deterministic about the influence of tech on people's lifestyles, though. In the end, it's all a choice that each of us make to a) do something easy and familiar or b) take a chance on an unfamiliar experience.
The lesson here is that children growing up in this and adults who have adapted to it need to trust their gut on whether what they're doing is satisfying.
We all know when an activity isn't giving back to us in a meaningful way, and frankly, I think it's that lesson that'd see third places hopping again.
I can relate to the point about “good enough”. I think it’s even more pronounced when one’s partner has a similar perspective to it too. I noticed that if either me or her push to go somewhere else, change of scenery, etc., we both end up saying “Wasn’t that nice? Why don’t we do it more often?” And yet, 1-2 months will pass before we do, because we are both ok with “good enough” most of the time.
Oh, absolutely. You know the atmosphere, you know the cost, you know the staff. I'm kinda into that to a degree - familiarity makes for some pretty rich third place vibes.
When good enough is at home, however. That's when we get into cabin fever territory.
I've got that at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. The staff knows us by now and they know the order by heart. "Same?" "Same!" Om nom nom. See you next week! It's also a good option when we are trying to decide where to go, and nobody has a good idea. We just default to this place, and it does not feel like a compromise or downgrade because we still love it.
The total package - food, friends and footsteps outside of the safe space! Food draws me out, too. I go to the same pub for a mean, well priced breakfast on the regular - almost to the dismay of my wife who'd rather eat something else l.
Our local hackerspace is surprisingly open. Honestly I somewhat preferred the time when it was smaller and a bit more gatekeepy as a result (not because we would exclude anybody but because if you didn't have an interesting project or something, you would not really have a motivation to join), because the people at that time did more interesting work on average, but it works okay as a larger community these days and it certainly is a place you can visit any time and between say 9 am to 3 am somebody's going to be there to chat. You don't need to be a member (and pay fees) to visit regularly, and we have a grill/community meet every friday. The only challenge is keeping it going by seeking out new members: over the years people naturally fall out because hackerspace projects often take a lot of time with no financial gain, so as you get a more demanding job and/or a family, you stop being active. Few people stay for 10+ years.
Various music communities. This is quite demanding because you need to be able to make music in some way, but the rewards are immense. The jazz community in my town especially is great - lots of cool people, great music, and with jazz it's natural to play in more than one band, substitute for others etc. Even going to band practice of a mediocre student big band every week is often a great social opportunity. There's a vibrant swing dance scene as well, which is much less demanding with regards to skill and accepting to newbies, though it seems to have a smell of "you need to have the right opinions to be one of us" for some reason, much more than the musicians.
Beer pubs. This is a bit less kosher since it generally involves drinking regularly, but Czechia is still managing to keep its beer culture, although covid did a number on cheap pubs. The essence is that we still have a lot of pubs that are reasonably cheap and that serve as a social equalizer, because the guests range from a homeless looking person to literally the president. It is not generally normalized to go alone and join random strangers, but there are pubs where it happens, and there are opportunities to do so in other pubs, like foreign language practice groups, tabletop game groups etc. I don't drink much these days, but I love our dirty pubs.
In all my time I can't say I've actually spent any significant time in a third space. I've knitted communities from people I've known since I was a teen and online spaces, but never joined one in person. Some amount of that is due to personal struggles more than availability, but also the ones I've seen seem a bad match.
That said, I think there's potential in rec centers. Places where teams can play various sports balls without needing to join a league or pay the associated fees. A modest gym. Space for a variety of courses, rooms for rent for other events or get togethers. Ideally these would be run by local governments, perhaps as extensions of libraries, or community ran non-profits. Focus on getting enough money to stay afloat, trying to keep barrier of entry to a minimum. Surely these already exist in some areas, right?
There have to be options for third spaces that aren't run by for profit entities. It's cool that game shops can be third spaces by hosting tournaments and the like, and often they can make them pretty accessible in terms of cost (ignoring the cost of a deck that won't get you wiped out immediately...). Or that folks seem to find them in bars some how. But when someone falls on hard times, they need community, and hard times makes money tight.
I fondly remember the library and attached coffee shop at the university I attended. I preferred studying there instead of at home where my family was too much of a distraction. Long hours, quiet, many different spaces (small desks tucked away behind bookshelves, open spaces with large tables, the coffee shop itself for social breaks and a snack). I felt free.
I note that one of the articles I shared does offer us some definition at least:
The fundamental problem with third spaces is that they are businesses, and thus are always set to extract value from it's patrons instead of enrich them. For that reason alone I am against the idea of them. But a while ago I saw a video that further set me against the idea.
But regardless of my personal opinion, the main problem with the concept of third spaces is less to do with how many there are and almost entirely to do with society's greater problems.
if you think about it, third spaces are everywhere. What is stopping you from talking to someone in the grocery store, the gas station, or the fast food place you're grabbing lunch at? Or to paraphrase another commenter, what is stopping you from visiting your library or groups at the community center in your town?
There's probably more that I can say but I'm running out of time now.
Speaking for myself, it's mainly a sense that unprompted interactions might be bothersome for the recipient, and to a lesser degree fear of a negative reaction. This may not have much bearing on reality, but I believe it's a somewhat common thought pattern.
My city runs a senior center that is a third space for many.
The local ymca is a nonprofit third space although it does cost to participate.