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After reading “Our Vanishing Third Places” by Ray Oldenburg, I couldn’t help but reflect on my life here in New York City, and the small, but adequate space I have carved out for myself (physically and metaphorically). I’ve lived in this city for over six years, and in those six years, I’ve lived in four different apartments in three different neighborhoods around Manhattan. The apartment buildings I have and currently live in have all been pre-war buildings which means stairs, and no elevators. In those six years of walking up and down stairs to get to and from my apartment, I have walked past so many people doing the same as me, coming and going. Common sense would refer to these people as “neighbors”, but in reality I couldn’t tell you one neighborly thing about them; not their name, how long they have lived in the building, and if I was asked, to even describe their faces.

I think about this and Oldenburg’s thesis that our “homes have been designed to protect people from community rather than connect them to it”, and he’s absolutely correct. During Hurricane Sandy, my building, and the entire Lower East Side, like the rest of Downtown Manhattan had no power for over a week. It was an experience I’ll never forget; having to live by candlelight, sleep in our winter clothes because we had no heat, and trek uptown to use the bathroom, and charge our mobile devices to stay connected to the world.

During that ordeal, which was more annoying than anything else, especially compared to the damage the storm had done to other surrounding areas, not once did a neighbor come knocking on our door to check if we were ok, or if we needed anything. Moreover, neither did my roommate or myself leave our little cave to knock on the doors of our neighbors’ to see if they were ok as well. For many in our building, the initial reaction was to leave the neighborhood, and flee to a more comfortable place to weather the storm. It’s like a natural survival instinct kicked in, and the notion of “save yourself” hit everyone like a ton of bricks. Over the span of that week, we would hear reports of apartments being robbed, women being easily assaulted at night because there were no street lights, and neighbors from areas in New Jersey who were stealing from each other.

Living in a big city like New York it’s very easy to lose sight of things like the true meaning of community, neighbor, and civic responsibility It’s a city where its inhabitants are labeled assholes, and how being tough is a prerequisite in order to survive here or else you’ll get eaten alive. We walk down streets, and ride subways avoiding eye contact because you can never be too sure about the people around you. We push, and shove to deal with the morning commute, and we walk quickly in and out of foot traffic to get where we’re going. We’re aggressive drivers in need of our hands to be surgically removed from the car’s horn, and we’re careless pedestrians who cross streets even in oncoming traffic. So not only have we designed our homes to prevent us from connecting to people, we’ve in essence designed our city to be that way as well.

I come from the so-called suburbia Ray Oldenburg describes in “Our Vanishing ‘Third Places’”. My childhood home has a property gate which defines the threshold between public and private property, a garage to house the cars which transport us to our nearest grocery stores and/or meetings with friends, and a fair amount of entertainment devices that keep us properly entertained in-house. Indeed, as Ray suggests, there was rarely a need for family to venture beyond that on the day-to-day.

For this reason, Oldenburg’s idea of “third places”, or informal gathering places, is intriguing to me. It explains why I’d always found an interest living in densely populated cities like New York and San Francisco. Where public gathering spaces are deeply integrated into the urban fabric of a city, there are endless opportunities for social interaction – i.e. public events, shops or even just on the street. Though this comes at the cost of personal privacy or individual autonomy, there’s no denying the fact that the living experience is more lively and the community more unified. Particularly for the young and the old, who in suburbia generally do not have the means or capacity to travel the long distances between the home and the nearest community center, this is crucial. My 81-year-old grandmother, who cannot drive and lives in a quiet, tree-lined residential neighborhood, looks forward to visits or meals out with the family, since they provide the sole opportunity of engaging with the community beyond her home.

As an answer to our lost physical “third places,” we have since created digital equivalents. Examples of this are social network platforms and online forums like Facebook or Reddit, which provide the ability to congregate, discuss and connect with others; and crowd-based service applications like Lyft and AirBnB that pride themselves on being able to encourage greater community engagement. With the exception of daily and spontaneous face-to-face interactions, digital “third places” arguably give us all that we could ever want or need on a scale that we could otherwise never recreate in the physical world.

I’m not sure what the next trend will be and whether we’ll eventually reach a happy medium between both physical and digital “third places”, but I’m definitely interested in seeing how that will play out in the future.