Michie on “Third Places”

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.