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 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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
...hours, mostly, but also restrictions on boistrous activity...
It’s always closed when I want to go!
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.
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 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.
...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...
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.
I note that one of the articles I shared does offer us some definition at least:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.