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Monthly Archives: September 2015
Karen’s Quick Indie Project: Plantstation
Make the city yours is an idea I heard of while visiting Smiling Hogshead Ranch over the summer. The Ranch started off as a guerrilla garden, a form of direct action to reclaim the commons. This made me think about the ways in which design can alter public spaces in the modern city. Specifically, what ways can design be used to intervene and transform mundane spaces into something more dynamic and more human for its inhabitants? Here’s my quick attempt at addressing this situation.
Filed under Quick Indie Project
Being There
This week is the fourth annual XOXO festival in Portland, Oregon. I attended the first two, and I remember the acute and profound feeling that I had finally found my tribe. The feeling that I was surrounded, for the first time, by people who shared my priorities and nerdy interests and goals and experiences and references. They’re my people! People from the internet!
XOXO is a strong reminder that our third spaces have hardly evaporated. No, we’re not unsocialized beasts, lost in the meaningless glow of our wretched devices. On the contrary — our needs to socialize are as strong as ever. We’ve just found different ways to satisfy those needs.
The paradox of the public commons is a fascinating one. I think of it every time I’m in an elevator, a Faraday cage with no cell service, yet every single rider is tapping and scrolling meaninglessly on their phones. Oldenburg’s rosy town halls, markets and taverns are often filled with people acting the same way. We have a lot of mediated experiences, and we don’t always look up.
And yet. When we look down at those devices, we find the richest, most accessible “third space” in history. Oldenburg’s piece, published twenty years ago, marks a cultural inflection point that is only truly being appreciated now.
I write often on the importance of physical spaces, and intend to focus my thesis on using technology to facilitate social interaction in the real world. But I’m beginning to more fully appreciate how blurry the lines between the physical and the virtual have become. How our public commons exists not to facilitate relationships between you and the six people who look a lot like you and share your background and sit at your neighborhood watering hole, but instead you and the vastly more diverse audience whose tweets you star and instagram posts you heart.
Oh, for the good Lord’s sake. Thinkpiece writers: People aren’t “hypersensitive” now. We can just HEAR each other better.
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) August 18, 2015
So. I see the acute need Oldenburg speaks of. I see the need to share our spaces, physical and virtual, and the deep need to be better to one another. But I don’t see a dearth of opportunities for connection. On the contrary, I see my public commons on Twitter. I see the “tonic” of “neutral ground” playing out on Metafilter, on Reddit. And I see endless opportunity to bridge these spaces with real-world meetups.
As I mentioned in my IxD pecha kucha, speaking of desire paths and workarounds, life finds a way. John Gilmore famously wrote that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” I view it as similarly routing around the infrastructural limitations brought on by the suburban sprawl that Oldenburg rightly rejects.
Filed under Third Places
Thoughts on “Our Vanishing Third Places” – Anupma
Ray Oldenburg’s article on “Our Vanishing Third Places” in some ways took me back in time. In the article, he says home is our first place, work is our second place, and third places are an escape from both. He describes them as “informal public gathering places” where people can “gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably” close to home.
It made me re-look at the places I’ve spent most years of my life so far. First,my parent’s home where I grew up, then the place I moved in with a friend after finishing college and then our home now in NY. Interestingly, when i think of these places now it’s not the physical space that occurs to me first but, the time, the people, the memories and how well these places fit in with the stages of life. Oldenburg’s concept of third places holds very different meanings for each of these places.
In the years growing up, our patio, neighborhood streets, parks, and shops were the primary places of social interactions. It all centered around children(me, too back then) playing and their parents & grandparents conversing and sharing their lives at the same place. In my 20’s when I started working and moved to a different city, these third place interactions shifted to coffee shops, restaurants, or a friend’s home. Neighborhood common space like parks or interacting with neighbors wasn’t something that resonated with our lifestyles & schedules. There was a shift, it wasn’t anymore about the neighborhood/ community but friends and a convenient location that provided a comfortable space to talk to each other. I’m not sure if these places even qualify the author’s definition of ‘third places’ considering that these were often not close to home and didn’t involve people from the neighborhood community.
When I moved to NY last year the unfamiliarity of the place, it’s people, my own life and lack of friends and family took a toll on my spirit. I found myself lost in the pace and loneliness of the city. The only thing that connected with me strongly was my home and it’s neighborhood. That pace and life was something I could relate to. It gave me solace, just sitting in the park or the waterfront and seeing people take their dogs for a walk or seeing them walk with friends and family gave me a sense of comfort and belongingness for this place. These places, outside the comforts of my home, filled in the void that I was experiencing with the shift. They gave me a chance to see, smile and sometimes interact and become friends with people I once didn’t know, in a community that was once new and unfamiliar to me. In many ways these “Third Places” made me feel ‘home’ yet again.
Filed under Third Places
Thoughts on “Third Places”, Emily
Ray Oldenburg describes “third places” as an informal gathering space for the people in a neighborhood. He argues that the need for these places are “important both to individuals and to the communities they live in.” Most of his points claim that these “third places” help grow the neighborhood into a closer, more caring community.
Growing up in the city, I wasn’t sure if I ever had a “third place.” While reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of all the TV shows I watch where families live in the suburbs and everyone knows each other whether in coffee shops or supermarkets. In a city like New York, I never got the chance to experience that. When I was young, my parents would never let me play on the streets, fearing that someone may come around and take me. The doors to the house would always be locked even though I was right outside the house, fearing that someone would break in. Bars would always be installed in all the windows, even if the building were three stories high. Therefore, the idea of a “third place” is not part of my lifestyle and I don’t seem to long for it as much as the author claims I should.
There were some points that Oldenburg made that could be up for debate.
“Third places also serve as ‘ports of entry’ for visitors and newcomers to the neighborhood where directions and other information can easily be obtained.” Not sure if it’s a culture reason or a “just being a typical New Yorker reason” but I have learned to take everything I encounter with skepticism. If someone starts a conversation with me randomly, my imminent thought is that they want something from me or else they wouldn’t be taking their time out to ask me how I am today. Visitors and newcomers can also obtain a vast amount of information about certain neighborhoods by searching on the web. Even before they arrive to the area, they would’ve read all about it in some blog or forum. I’m not arguing that the author is wrong about information being easily obtained, it could be true. But in a place like New York City where the area is always changing and people are always moving in and out of neighborhoods, it is hard to say that this “third place” can serve as much of a guidance for them..
“Third places help unify the neighborhood”. The descriptions to these statements were rather vague. The author argues that people who live in the same vicinity often fail to know their neighbors because there was an absence of third places. In the few neighborhoods I’ve lived in, even with the presence of what might be considered a “third place” people would still not take the time out to know each other. The time that could be taken to spent in a local deli or pizzeria can be spent at home with loved ones.
My views of a tight knit neighborhood community is not present therefore my views could be biased. The author makes a good case of argument as to why a “third place” is always important in the neighborhood, but I just can’t see it fitting in a metro city, or in my life in general. All in all, I believe that caring for your neighborhood and knowing your surroundings is important, but is knowing what the neighborhood kids and families are up to important to my life? (Very selfish question, I know.)
Filed under Third Places
Tingting’s Quick Indie Project
Click here to review it from Dropbox.
Filed under Quick Indie Project
HobsonCard
HobsonCard is an alarm clock that imposes a specified consequence (for instance, finding a random outgoing SMS in your phone’s archive and tweeting it to the world) if you fail to swipe into your designated subway station before a certain time each weekday morning. See here.
Filed under Quick Indie Project
Thoughts on Our Vanishing “Third Places”
In Ray Oldenburg’s article, informal public gathering places are defined as our third places. When people live in metropolis, it seems obvious to distinguish personal residential and public places because we mainly live individually with less connections between neighborhood than suburb life. Throughout the whole article, I was thinking how did the “vanishing” word come out, since third places are everywhere. The question still exists in my mind, but I want to describe some thoughts based on my living environment in Beijing.
I was born on 90s and when I was young, I lived in a large yard with my parents. The large yard had several families, each family lived in their own house. Generally, there was no bathroom in the house, so either people live in the same yard built one or two and shared it or they went the public bathroom outside the yard. Yards were lined together on two sides and made up with an alley which we call Hutong in China. During my time in the yard, I felt that neighbors did connect to each other well. Even though we didn’t stick together a lot like having parties a lot, it was common to see children play together and families helped mutually. There were groceries, hardware stores and diners in alleys, usually people who operated these places also lived in the same alley which means a person was able to recognize most of people lived surrounded you most of time.
As Beijing grew as a more modern city, many alleys were dismantled and people moved to apartment buildings. Old neighborhood life nearly disappeared and this culture became history in books and memories. When my family moved to an apartment, we no longer had much touch with neighbors, neither others lived in apartment did. My parents even thought they weren’t our neighbors, they were just people who lived in the same building. Several buildings made a residential area with a name. At that time, third places were more like places between home and work places where we might pass everyday or went there for reasons. Before that, I mean when I lived in the yard, our yard could be the third place and people get together not only physically but also emotionally.
We all know nowadays the price of owning a house in China is still unbelievably increasing, besides of the vast amount of need, locating a residential area with existed or potential public facilities as many as possible also contributes to rising price. All people intend to live with nice neighbors and easily-reaching public places. Those old residential areas such as where I moved the first time also improved community services. However, these services were mostly for caring older adults, so some third places were built for gathering our grandparents to alleviate their loneliness at home.
From Oldenburg’s opinions, I agree with some benefits of third places that third places create convenience, entertainment and carefulness for residents. But for me most third places are too functional to make more emotional interaction with people there, and neighborhood bonding remains weak no matter I was in Beijing or in NYC. Is it a kind of vanishing?
Filed under Readings, Third Places
How do we “grow” more third places?
Oldenburg has many points about “third places” – namely, that they are necessary for community and individual well-being, that we are witnessing a decline of them, and that city planners ought to do everything they can to encourage the organic growth of these places.
While most of these points are relatively obvious and mundane, I found one of Oldenburg’s recommendation to city planners on how to do the latter most interesting: He suggests to city planners that one way to encourage the existence of “third places” is to make cities more “walkable.” He doesn’t spend too much time on this point (just one sentence, in fact), but I think this point, out of many of his points, is one around which there can and should be more discussion.
For example: How exactly can we make cities more “walkable”? Or, perhaps more specifically, how can we take into account the character, geography, layout, and culture of an existing city and make it more “walkable”? What is the relationship between the “walkability” of a city and…
- …its density? (i.e. Does a denser city have an easier time of “growing” – for lack of a better term – third places?)
- …its public transportation system (if there is one)? (i.e. Does public transportation affect a city’s walkability at all? Or is it irrelevant because the idea is that people won’t need to use public transportation to reach third places?)
- …its culture? (i.e. Do some cultures lend themselves to third places more than other cultures? How do we pinpoint these kinds of cultural attributes? And, conversely, how might we encourage these kinds of cultural attributes through the existence of third places? An obvious one might be food.)
- …its level of geographical racial/class segregation? (i.e. Shouldn’t we to aim most to encourage third places where they might serve a secondary purpose of counteracting racial/class segregation?)
- …its topography? (e.g. Where might third places make the most sense in neighborhoods that are hilly? In seaside neighborhoods? In neighborhoods near a lake? Or a forest? Neighborhoods on a mountain?)
- …its financial stability and wealth? (i.e. Does greater wealth correspond to more third places, or is it the inverse?)
- …etc
Another of Oldenburg’s points that I think leaves room for more discussion is his observation that third places tend to independently-owned, rather than corporate chains. His observation may be true, but I think there is room for more nuance here. I would posit that the nature of ownership of a particular establishment is only one of many aspects that affects the degree to which a third place benefits the community. Other factors that I think are as important (if not more important, in some cases) might be:
- What the establishment sells, i.e. food? arcade games? hookah?. For obvious reasons, this greatly affects who the clientele are, and, as a result, affects the effectiveness of the establishment to bring together the diverse crowds that Oldenburg describes.
- Price range. This is important in determining the accessibility of an establishment. It’s likely that establishments that are more affordable to the general public will serve as more effective third places.
- The culture / atmosphere of the establishment. This atmosphere can be created by the owners of the establishment (regardless of whether its a chain or independently owned), but it’s likely that one that is warm, inclusive, and relaxed is more likely to be an effective third place.
Oldenburg’s article does a great job of making the case for more third places to exist. Many of his points are straightforward, and it’s great conversation starter. Now let’s move the conversation forward.
Filed under Third Places