K
Klaus Philipsen
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
What Makes a Good Third Place?
In my brother’s hometown of historic Herrenberg, Germany (population 34,000), running for office—he serves on the city council—involves setting up a stand on the central market square. City hall, a church, and stately half-timbered medieval gabled buildings frame an irregular plaza in the center of town whose spatial quality rivals the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.
Every Saturday, people stream into the square from a web of connecting alleys to buy produce, bread, flowers, and cheese. They shop, but they also chat—with merchants and with one another. By the time the purchases are done, hands have been shaken, pamphlets distributed, and the latest news exchanged, whether it is summer or winter, rain or shine. Herrenberg’s market square is a perfect social place—a true “third place.”
In the suburban outskirts of my adopted hometown, Baltimore, candidates for office stand at the corner of two arterial roads waving placards at passing motorists. The landmark is a silver diner sitting behind a sea of parking. Each road leading to the intersection has two or three through-lanes and dedicated turn lanes in every direction.
A large “No Kings” rally with several hundred people recently took place there. Protesters lined the four corners of the intersection, waving signs into the roar of traffic while drivers honked in support. This is not a social place.
Baltimore does, in fact, have a slew of farmers markets. Neighbors meet there, pamphlets are distributed, and buskers occasionally perform music. In that sense, these are indeed third places—temporary places to shop, meet, and chat. However, as soon as the market stalls are removed, the spaces revert to parking lots in obscure corners where people have little reason to linger. In most cases, this is not merely a transitional condition; there is no plan to transform these spaces into enduring civic places.
By contrast, Herrenberg’s market square remains vibrant at all hours, day and night, with shops, restaurants, cobblestones, and spaces reserved for people rather than cars.
For a good social place—or third place—to become a meaningful public space, the examples show that we need more than temporary activity. We also need design.
That function should inform design is familiar to architects and urban designers alike. It applies not only to buildings but also to the spaces between them. Just as a gymnasium does not function particularly well as a concert hall, a space designed primarily for parking cars is not ideal as a public gathering place.
I recently heard someone describe the relationship between buildings and urban space this way: In traditional cities, buildings define spaces; in modern suburbs spaces define buildings. In suburbia, buildings are usually low and surrounded by so much leftover space that the public realm remains undefined, bleeding outward in every direction.
Why does the quality of public urban space matter? And why is there so much discussion today about “third places”? What are they, anyway?
Third places are informal public gathering places. The phrase derives from considering our homes the “first” place in our lives and workplaces the “second.” The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in his 1989 book The Great Good Place.
I have addressed in numerous blog articles the profound transformations cities—and entire societies—are experiencing, transformations for which no final destination is yet visible. Even as third places evolve as part of these shifts, they remain fundamental building blocks of civic life. Their design continues to pose one of the most enduring challenges to the design professions.
When third places are deficient or missing altogether, social pathologies emerge. We understand these failures far better than we understand what consistently makes successful third places.
Long before the onset of Covid and social media, growing loneliness had already been identified as a societal problem related to the fragmentation of public life and the disappearance of shared civic experiences.
After Oldenburg, it was Robert D. Putnam who, in his turn-of-the-century book Bowling Alone, argued that American social capital had declined significantly since the 1960s, producing a less connected and less civically engaged society.
Using extensive data, Putnam traced declining participation in community groups, bowling leagues, churches, and political organizations, arguing that these losses harmed both individual well-being and democratic health. He laid much of the blame at the feet of television and suburban sprawl.
One could add stagnant wages and economic pressure requiring two or more earners per household, with many people working multiple jobs simply to make ends meet. There is little time left for bowling leagues, church suppers, or neighborhood gatherings.
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness and isolation a national epidemic. He pointed to the health risks associated with social disconnection, arguing that they are more widespread than diabetes or obesity and potentially just as deadly. Loneliness, he noted, increases the risk of premature mortality by 26 percent and can be as harmful as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day (Surgeon Generals report).
The problem with third places can be physical—they may not exist or may be poorly designed—or behavioral. Watching movies at home, shopping online, or staring at phone screens instead of engaging with others can all deepen isolation.
He also argued that designing cities for humans rather than solely for cars or business interests is essential for creating spaces where people can interact in real life.
For architects and planners, the physical side of third places is of particular interest. While Murthy mentions cities, perhaps the most widespread geography of loneliness is suburban America.
For decades, suburban planning prioritized the automobile. Suburbs were designed almost exclusively around “first places” (housing) and “second places” (workplaces), but rarely around shared community spaces where people could interact spontaneously.
In fact, the demise of the third place did not begin with online shopping, the internet, remote work, or AI. It began when public spaces were considered superfluous and were replaced by private yards in the modern suburb.
Not all is well in cities either.
In the 1970s, I lived in a working-class neighborhood in central Stuttgart, Germany. Nearly every block had a corner pub where neighborhood residents gathered. Many had a reserved long table for regulars—the famous “Stammtisch.”
The Social Democratic Party was still strong and held large public meetings to debate local and national politics. Union members and their families spent weekends in the so-called “Waldheime” (“forest halls”), former villas set amid wooded hillsides overlooking Stuttgart. These places could accommodate dozens, even hundreds, of people. Children played while adults drank beer and debated politics outdoors beneath enormous trees.
The English pub is similarly famous as a neighborhood social institution.
Immigrants to the United States once recreated such communal places near their new homes. In 1899, some 500,000 Baltimoreans were served by more than 1,800 corner bars. Some doubled as Democratic clubs; others featured outdoor beer gardens. Ethnic communities—Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, and many others—built their own stately halls that served functions similar to Stuttgart’s Waldheime.
Little Italy became its own social world, where old men played bocce and neighbors gathered outdoors to watch Italian films projected onto the side of a building.
By the time I arrived in Baltimore, the decline of these establishments was already far advanced, fueled by urban flight, disinvestment, and racial tension—all forces that also contributed to loneliness.
Disinvestment left behind neighborhoods where liquor stores replaced corner bars. Alcohol became associated less with community than with isolation, sold through bulletproof plexiglass windows. There was little opportunity simply to walk in and encounter familiar faces.
Young people hanging around outside such establishments often do so because of the absence of work, opportunity, and better places to gather.
The urban history of third places cannot be told without addressing race and class.
The French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, especially in his influential book The Production of Space, explored how urban space is shaped not only physically but socially and politically.
Lefebvre described space as experienced, perceived, and imagined, emphasizing how access, appropriation, and domination shape public life.
In the United States, racial segregation deeply influenced who could occupy public space, who controlled it, and who was excluded from it. Even seating on public transit buses became subject to racial hierarchy. Parks, pools, restaurants, and entire neighborhoods were shaped by systems of exclusion.
Through segregation, disinvestment, and neglect, third places can shift from civic assets into liabilities. The neglected Central Park of the 1970s and 1980s, or the abandoned pocket park filled with needles and illegal activity, illustrates how public space can deteriorate when social stewardship disappears.
Today, parks, playgrounds, and urban plazas once again receive serious attention, not only in New York and not only in affluent areas.
Older East Coast cities still retain traces of an earlier civic model in which municipalities operated bathhouses, public markets, swimming pools, recreation centers, and libraries—all effectively third places, even before the term existed.
Baltimore still has five public market halls, four in neighborhoods that could be characterized as food deserts. Common in Europe, indoor markets still exist in many US cities such as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Seattle or even Los Angeles as well. Similar indoor markets survive in cities such as Philadelphia, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles.
These markets have proven more durable than the suburban shopping mall, which temporarily functioned as a privatized substitute for public civic life. Yet malls—with their piped-in music, chain stores, and tightly controlled environments—ultimately failed to satisfy deeper human desires for authenticity, nature, and social spontaneity.
As malls declined, suburbia struggled to invent meaningful replacements.
Architectural critic Alexandra Lange captured this tension in her book Meet Me by the Fountain, describing malls as both “temples of commerce” and the “agora of the suburbs.”
Cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia with their traditionally strong local pride and cohesion around local sports teams, brews and tightly knit ethnic enclaves offer particularly rich case studies in what went wrong during the era of urban renewal and urban flight and how it diminished teh public roam. A nostalgic British video describes in great detail how the overseas version of the decline of Main Street translated into a loss of community and more isolation.
Long before others recognized the danger, Jane Jacobs warned that destroying lively public streets would destroy the soul of the city. Her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains essential reading.
In the 1970s, Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer launched an ambitious “renaissance” for the struggling city. Public spaces became central to his strategy: annual city fairs, Harborplace, tall ship festivals, plazas, skywalks, and entertainment districts.
Yet urban renewal often turned its back on traditional streets. Windswept plazas surrounded by modern office towers lacked the “eyes on the street” Jacobs considered essential. Despite programming, concerts, folding chairs, and maintenance crews, many spaces remained lifeless.
In the post-Covid era of remote work, social media addiction, and gig-economy fragmentation, sustaining public life has become even more difficult. City street life and public transit ridership remain behind what they were before the pandemic in most cities in spite of continued global growth of urban conglomerations and the much discussed "creative class" supposedly infusing urban life and despite widespread conversion of older business buildings into apartments.
Urban malls, created in the futile attempt to compete with the suburbs, came late and died early, sharing the fate of their suburban original. The Pavilions in Denver face partial demolition after only 25 years, so does Horton Plaza in San Diego and many others, too. Denver's idea for the "Pavilions" A public open space as part of a "social district" in a radical expansion of the notion of "third place".
Similarly, Baltimore’s Harborplace pavilions, once symbolized urban revival, eventually followed the trajectory of bigger malls: decline, receivership, and now possible demolition.
In his book The City of Tomorrow the British urbanist Peter Hall criticized what he called the “Rousification of America” in Cities of Tomorrow: the transformation of cities into entertainment stages managed by private corporations such as the The Rouse Company.
Ironically, Baltimore now seeks salvation for the harbor by privatizing even more space through residential tower development.
Yet traditional urban squares and parks endure remarkably well, whether they are baked into the urban fabric from the beginning as in the case of Savannah, Ga or Washington DC or were later additions such as Atlanta's Centennial Park.
Baltimore’s most successful public space may well be Mount Vernon Place surrounding the Washington Monument. Its symmetrical park quadrants and stately architecture create an urban composition that admirers compare to Paris.
All around the world and for centuries public parks have served as quintessential third places. Whether Boston Common, Central Park, Bryant Park, or Baltimore’s Patterson Park, a successful make-up requires that they are well maintained, safe, and defined by active, occupied buildings. around them.
Universities have long organized themselves around campus greens—classic third spaces designed to foster interaction. Contemporary expansion plans continue to emphasize informal mingling among students from different disciplines. Landscape architect Dorothy Faris notes that spontaneous conversations in third places are essential to student well-being and social connection.
As habits change, new forms of third places emerge.
Dog parks, reclaimed waterfronts, freeway caps, and reinvented public libraries all represent contemporary adaptations. Libraries in cities such as Seattle and San Diego continue to thrive by reinventing themselves architecturally and programmatically.
Waterfront redevelopment may represent America’s greatest success in creating new types of attractive public urban space in the form of parks, promenades or riverwalks. Cities large and small—from New York City and Chicago to Frederick and Norfolk—have rediscovered rivers, harbors, and creeks as civic assets.
Even cities without major waterways sometimes create them. James Rouse famously built a lake in Columbia to anchor civic life around a newly created waterfront.
Finally the term "third space" has become inflationary and is now also used for spaces inside private offices, restaurants, museums and libraries designed for people to interact, sometimes by melting the line between inside and outside.
Art, long discovered as a force that can revive or become a pioneer is another antidote to loneliness, often temporary in nature. As Daisy Fancourt argues in Arts in Health, the arts possess remarkable power to foster connection and well-being.
The other night I attended an art walk in Baltimore's in the Station North Arts and entertainment district preceded by a happy hour mingle with locally brewed beer brewed in a former industrial building . It was a beautiful spring evening and a good sized group enjoyed the guided tour of creative light installations next to a playground, on an otherwise banal parking garage across from an arthouse movie, on the facade of a night club to be redeveloped as an arts hub and a small gathering place on the footprint of a demolished modernist former concrete retail cube.
Baltimore urbanites always register it with relief that urban life is still there in spite of all challenges, especially when finding it in blocks that were considered sketchy not too long ago .
The combination of art with the physical analog company of fellow walkers awakes sensory impressions of happiness and discovery. In that instance all of Station North became a third space, united by art, imagination and the desire to be with others in the city.
Night markets, art festivals and street concerts similarly allow third places to appear on a temporary basis.
The American commentator, journalist and book author Ezra Klein argues that technology has never been able to fulfill demands but just shifted it to higher levels. He argues that AI will likewise not eliminate the desire for human contact but rather elevate it, although he isn't sure. In a commentary in the New York Times he allows for the possibility that AI is different than previous technologies and could advance isolation further.
While the jury on this matter is still out, it is probably fair to say that no virtual reality or digital medium can replace the real life analogue experience of a crowded city plaza or the experience of urban art installations in the company of a group of people eager to learn with open minds on a warm spring evening; just as an online transmitted religious service is no substitute for the experience of community in a congregation assembled in a church nave for song and prayer. A virtual online "no kings" protest makes no sense.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
In my brother’s hometown of historic Herrenberg, Germany (population 34,000), running for office—he serves on the city council—involves setting up a stand on the central market square. City hall, a church, and stately half-timbered medieval gabled buildings frame an irregular plaza in the center of town whose spatial quality rivals the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Herrenberg Marktplatz (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]Every Saturday, people stream into the square from a web of connecting alleys to buy produce, bread, flowers, and cheese. They shop, but they also chat—with merchants and with one another. By the time the purchases are done, hands have been shaken, pamphlets distributed, and the latest news exchanged, whether it is summer or winter, rain or shine. Herrenberg’s market square is a perfect social place—a true “third place.”
In the suburban outskirts of my adopted hometown, Baltimore, candidates for office stand at the corner of two arterial roads waving placards at passing motorists. The landmark is a silver diner sitting behind a sea of parking. Each road leading to the intersection has two or three through-lanes and dedicated turn lanes in every direction.
A large “No Kings” rally with several hundred people recently took place there. Protesters lined the four corners of the intersection, waving signs into the roar of traffic while drivers honked in support. This is not a social place.
Baltimore does, in fact, have a slew of farmers markets. Neighbors meet there, pamphlets are distributed, and buskers occasionally perform music. In that sense, these are indeed third places—temporary places to shop, meet, and chat. However, as soon as the market stalls are removed, the spaces revert to parking lots in obscure corners where people have little reason to linger. In most cases, this is not merely a transitional condition; there is no plan to transform these spaces into enduring civic places.
By contrast, Herrenberg’s market square remains vibrant at all hours, day and night, with shops, restaurants, cobblestones, and spaces reserved for people rather than cars.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Farmers market on a parking lot, Baltimore (Photo: Philipsen)
[/td]For a good social place—or third place—to become a meaningful public space, the examples show that we need more than temporary activity. We also need design.
That function should inform design is familiar to architects and urban designers alike. It applies not only to buildings but also to the spaces between them. Just as a gymnasium does not function particularly well as a concert hall, a space designed primarily for parking cars is not ideal as a public gathering place.
I recently heard someone describe the relationship between buildings and urban space this way: In traditional cities, buildings define spaces; in modern suburbs spaces define buildings. In suburbia, buildings are usually low and surrounded by so much leftover space that the public realm remains undefined, bleeding outward in every direction.
Why does the quality of public urban space matter? And why is there so much discussion today about “third places”? What are they, anyway?
Third places are informal public gathering places. The phrase derives from considering our homes the “first” place in our lives and workplaces the “second.” The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in his 1989 book The Great Good Place.
I have addressed in numerous blog articles the profound transformations cities—and entire societies—are experiencing, transformations for which no final destination is yet visible. Even as third places evolve as part of these shifts, they remain fundamental building blocks of civic life. Their design continues to pose one of the most enduring challenges to the design professions.
When third places are deficient or missing altogether, social pathologies emerge. We understand these failures far better than we understand what consistently makes successful third places.
The Loneliness Crisis and the Decline of Third Places
Long before the onset of Covid and social media, growing loneliness had already been identified as a societal problem related to the fragmentation of public life and the disappearance of shared civic experiences.
After Oldenburg, it was Robert D. Putnam who, in his turn-of-the-century book Bowling Alone, argued that American social capital had declined significantly since the 1960s, producing a less connected and less civically engaged society.
Using extensive data, Putnam traced declining participation in community groups, bowling leagues, churches, and political organizations, arguing that these losses harmed both individual well-being and democratic health. He laid much of the blame at the feet of television and suburban sprawl.
[td]
[/td]
One could add stagnant wages and economic pressure requiring two or more earners per household, with many people working multiple jobs simply to make ends meet. There is little time left for bowling leagues, church suppers, or neighborhood gatherings.
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness and isolation a national epidemic. He pointed to the health risks associated with social disconnection, arguing that they are more widespread than diabetes or obesity and potentially just as deadly. Loneliness, he noted, increases the risk of premature mortality by 26 percent and can be as harmful as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day (Surgeon Generals report).
The problem with third places can be physical—they may not exist or may be poorly designed—or behavioral. Watching movies at home, shopping online, or staring at phone screens instead of engaging with others can all deepen isolation.
He also argued that designing cities for humans rather than solely for cars or business interests is essential for creating spaces where people can interact in real life.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Suburban shopping Baltimore County (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]For architects and planners, the physical side of third places is of particular interest. While Murthy mentions cities, perhaps the most widespread geography of loneliness is suburban America.
For decades, suburban planning prioritized the automobile. Suburbs were designed almost exclusively around “first places” (housing) and “second places” (workplaces), but rarely around shared community spaces where people could interact spontaneously.
In fact, the demise of the third place did not begin with online shopping, the internet, remote work, or AI. It began when public spaces were considered superfluous and were replaced by private yards in the modern suburb.
But Cities Are Not Automatically Better
Not all is well in cities either.
In the 1970s, I lived in a working-class neighborhood in central Stuttgart, Germany. Nearly every block had a corner pub where neighborhood residents gathered. Many had a reserved long table for regulars—the famous “Stammtisch.”
The Social Democratic Party was still strong and held large public meetings to debate local and national politics. Union members and their families spent weekends in the so-called “Waldheime” (“forest halls”), former villas set amid wooded hillsides overlooking Stuttgart. These places could accommodate dozens, even hundreds, of people. Children played while adults drank beer and debated politics outdoors beneath enormous trees.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Shopping on Market Street, Frederick, MD
(Photo: Philipsen)
[/td](Photo: Philipsen)
The English pub is similarly famous as a neighborhood social institution.
Immigrants to the United States once recreated such communal places near their new homes. In 1899, some 500,000 Baltimoreans were served by more than 1,800 corner bars. Some doubled as Democratic clubs; others featured outdoor beer gardens. Ethnic communities—Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, and many others—built their own stately halls that served functions similar to Stuttgart’s Waldheime.
Little Italy became its own social world, where old men played bocce and neighbors gathered outdoors to watch Italian films projected onto the side of a building.
By the time I arrived in Baltimore, the decline of these establishments was already far advanced, fueled by urban flight, disinvestment, and racial tension—all forces that also contributed to loneliness.
Disinvestment left behind neighborhoods where liquor stores replaced corner bars. Alcohol became associated less with community than with isolation, sold through bulletproof plexiglass windows. There was little opportunity simply to walk in and encounter familiar faces.
Young people hanging around outside such establishments often do so because of the absence of work, opportunity, and better places to gather.
When Third Places Become Instruments of Division
The urban history of third places cannot be told without addressing race and class.
The French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, especially in his influential book The Production of Space, explored how urban space is shaped not only physically but socially and politically.
Lefebvre described space as experienced, perceived, and imagined, emphasizing how access, appropriation, and domination shape public life.
In the United States, racial segregation deeply influenced who could occupy public space, who controlled it, and who was excluded from it. Even seating on public transit buses became subject to racial hierarchy. Parks, pools, restaurants, and entire neighborhoods were shaped by systems of exclusion.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Neglected public space in disinvested community
in Baltimore (Photo: Philipsen)
[/td]in Baltimore (Photo: Philipsen)
Through segregation, disinvestment, and neglect, third places can shift from civic assets into liabilities. The neglected Central Park of the 1970s and 1980s, or the abandoned pocket park filled with needles and illegal activity, illustrates how public space can deteriorate when social stewardship disappears.
Public Markets and the Reinvention of Civic Space
Today, parks, playgrounds, and urban plazas once again receive serious attention, not only in New York and not only in affluent areas.
Older East Coast cities still retain traces of an earlier civic model in which municipalities operated bathhouses, public markets, swimming pools, recreation centers, and libraries—all effectively third places, even before the term existed.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Public Library San Diego (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]Baltimore still has five public market halls, four in neighborhoods that could be characterized as food deserts. Common in Europe, indoor markets still exist in many US cities such as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Seattle or even Los Angeles as well. Similar indoor markets survive in cities such as Philadelphia, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles.
These markets have proven more durable than the suburban shopping mall, which temporarily functioned as a privatized substitute for public civic life. Yet malls—with their piped-in music, chain stores, and tightly controlled environments—ultimately failed to satisfy deeper human desires for authenticity, nature, and social spontaneity.
As malls declined, suburbia struggled to invent meaningful replacements.
Architectural critic Alexandra Lange captured this tension in her book Meet Me by the Fountain, describing malls as both “temples of commerce” and the “agora of the suburbs.”
Urban Renewal and the Destruction of Urban Life
Cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia with their traditionally strong local pride and cohesion around local sports teams, brews and tightly knit ethnic enclaves offer particularly rich case studies in what went wrong during the era of urban renewal and urban flight and how it diminished teh public roam. A nostalgic British video describes in great detail how the overseas version of the decline of Main Street translated into a loss of community and more isolation.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
High Street as a third place
Screenshot from British High Street video.
[/td]Screenshot from British High Street video.
Long before others recognized the danger, Jane Jacobs warned that destroying lively public streets would destroy the soul of the city. Her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains essential reading.
In the 1970s, Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer launched an ambitious “renaissance” for the struggling city. Public spaces became central to his strategy: annual city fairs, Harborplace, tall ship festivals, plazas, skywalks, and entertainment districts.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Baltimore HarborPlace (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]Yet urban renewal often turned its back on traditional streets. Windswept plazas surrounded by modern office towers lacked the “eyes on the street” Jacobs considered essential. Despite programming, concerts, folding chairs, and maintenance crews, many spaces remained lifeless.
The Most Recent Challenges
In the post-Covid era of remote work, social media addiction, and gig-economy fragmentation, sustaining public life has become even more difficult. City street life and public transit ridership remain behind what they were before the pandemic in most cities in spite of continued global growth of urban conglomerations and the much discussed "creative class" supposedly infusing urban life and despite widespread conversion of older business buildings into apartments.
Urban malls, created in the futile attempt to compete with the suburbs, came late and died early, sharing the fate of their suburban original. The Pavilions in Denver face partial demolition after only 25 years, so does Horton Plaza in San Diego and many others, too. Denver's idea for the "Pavilions" A public open space as part of a "social district" in a radical expansion of the notion of "third place".
Similarly, Baltimore’s Harborplace pavilions, once symbolized urban revival, eventually followed the trajectory of bigger malls: decline, receivership, and now possible demolition.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Horton Plaza, a failing urban mall (Photo: Philipsen)
[/td]In his book The City of Tomorrow the British urbanist Peter Hall criticized what he called the “Rousification of America” in Cities of Tomorrow: the transformation of cities into entertainment stages managed by private corporations such as the The Rouse Company.
Ironically, Baltimore now seeks salvation for the harbor by privatizing even more space through residential tower development.
The Enduring Strength of Traditional Public Space
Yet traditional urban squares and parks endure remarkably well, whether they are baked into the urban fabric from the beginning as in the case of Savannah, Ga or Washington DC or were later additions such as Atlanta's Centennial Park.
Baltimore’s most successful public space may well be Mount Vernon Place surrounding the Washington Monument. Its symmetrical park quadrants and stately architecture create an urban composition that admirers compare to Paris.
All around the world and for centuries public parks have served as quintessential third places. Whether Boston Common, Central Park, Bryant Park, or Baltimore’s Patterson Park, a successful make-up requires that they are well maintained, safe, and defined by active, occupied buildings. around them.
New Forms of Third Places
Universities have long organized themselves around campus greens—classic third spaces designed to foster interaction. Contemporary expansion plans continue to emphasize informal mingling among students from different disciplines. Landscape architect Dorothy Faris notes that spontaneous conversations in third places are essential to student well-being and social connection.
As habits change, new forms of third places emerge.
Dog parks, reclaimed waterfronts, freeway caps, and reinvented public libraries all represent contemporary adaptations. Libraries in cities such as Seattle and San Diego continue to thrive by reinventing themselves architecturally and programmatically.
Waterfront redevelopment may represent America’s greatest success in creating new types of attractive public urban space in the form of parks, promenades or riverwalks. Cities large and small—from New York City and Chicago to Frederick and Norfolk—have rediscovered rivers, harbors, and creeks as civic assets.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Tampa Riverwalk
[/td]Even cities without major waterways sometimes create them. James Rouse famously built a lake in Columbia to anchor civic life around a newly created waterfront.
Finally the term "third space" has become inflationary and is now also used for spaces inside private offices, restaurants, museums and libraries designed for people to interact, sometimes by melting the line between inside and outside.
Art as a Third Place
Art, long discovered as a force that can revive or become a pioneer is another antidote to loneliness, often temporary in nature. As Daisy Fancourt argues in Arts in Health, the arts possess remarkable power to foster connection and well-being.
The other night I attended an art walk in Baltimore's in the Station North Arts and entertainment district preceded by a happy hour mingle with locally brewed beer brewed in a former industrial building . It was a beautiful spring evening and a good sized group enjoyed the guided tour of creative light installations next to a playground, on an otherwise banal parking garage across from an arthouse movie, on the facade of a night club to be redeveloped as an arts hub and a small gathering place on the footprint of a demolished modernist former concrete retail cube.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives.
Daisy Fancourt
[/td]Daisy Fancourt
Baltimore urbanites always register it with relief that urban life is still there in spite of all challenges, especially when finding it in blocks that were considered sketchy not too long ago .
The combination of art with the physical analog company of fellow walkers awakes sensory impressions of happiness and discovery. In that instance all of Station North became a third space, united by art, imagination and the desire to be with others in the city.
Night markets, art festivals and street concerts similarly allow third places to appear on a temporary basis.
Lessons to Be Learned
Even the best physical third spaces won't work if they are devoid of people. A successful third space needs a good vessel but also the human interaction. The isolation resulting from TV, Internet, social media and AI cannot be solely overcome by offering good public spaces but a lack of public spaces certainly contributes to isolation.The American commentator, journalist and book author Ezra Klein argues that technology has never been able to fulfill demands but just shifted it to higher levels. He argues that AI will likewise not eliminate the desire for human contact but rather elevate it, although he isn't sure. In a commentary in the New York Times he allows for the possibility that AI is different than previous technologies and could advance isolation further.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Third Place playground in Denver (Photo: Philipsen)
[/td]While the jury on this matter is still out, it is probably fair to say that no virtual reality or digital medium can replace the real life analogue experience of a crowded city plaza or the experience of urban art installations in the company of a group of people eager to learn with open minds on a warm spring evening; just as an online transmitted religious service is no substitute for the experience of community in a congregation assembled in a church nave for song and prayer. A virtual online "no kings" protest makes no sense.
Which is why Disney can capture some of the appearances of urban space in its amusement parks, but can't touch the experience of a real city that offers much more than amusement. In a city all humans become actors, whether they are on their way to work, are at work, shop, protest, visit, entertain or beg at a street corner. Precisely those third places that best accommodate the messy mix of human actions best provide the richest experience, the belonging we yearn for.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA