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from a european perspective: thats so blatantly obvious, I am kinda baffled that this is even news :-( isn't the "third place" concept not widely known/accepte

from a european perspective: thats so blatantly obvious, I am kinda baffled that this is even news :-( isn't the "third place" concept not widely known/accepted? (1st place: work, 2nd place: home, 3rd place: communal spaces) The availability/quality of these 3rd places _directly_ correlates with QoL/happiness of people. I would get severe depression when I only swap between home/work/car, thats not a life, thats surviving, in isolation.

HPsquared 3y ago
I think a lot of people in the US see the communal spaces as a lost cause.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I think a lot of people in the US refuse to see as "communal spaces" what lots of other people in the US use as their communal spaces.
- acabal 3y ago
  I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out. Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?
  - PopAlongKid 3y ago
    > most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. They all know what a park/playground is
    - acabal 3y ago
      Playgrounds require you to have children with you - for example I don't think it would be socially acceptable for a group of unaccompanied adults to show up to a playground and sip some beers while they chat amongst themselves, like you might do in a public plaza in Europe. Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        Most parks with playgrounds in America are, by area, 90% park and 10% playground. Or something roughly like that; the playgrounds are designated areas tucked away into some corner of the parks. Except you're probably not allowed to drink beer there anyway, because a law against drinking in the park provides a convenient excuse to keep the park clear of homeless so everybody else can enjoy it.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        Its usually not literally just a playground. Its usually a whole park which happens to have a playground or two. For instance, this last weekend I went to a park with some adult friends which had playgrounds, but we were there for the disc golf. There were other adults having some kind of cookout at the grills and picnic tables. There were adults playing soccer in one of the fields. Then yes, there were kids and parents at the playgrounds. The vast majority of parks I see around me aren't just a playground. Those mostly seem pretty rare.
      - RestlessMind 3y ago
        > But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. Reality disagrees with you. Just search for parks on Google maps for SV and you will see so many where playgrounds are just a small part and the rest of the park is for everyone - https://www.google.com/maps/ https://www.google.com/maps/ My favorite ones: Las Palmas, Cuesta, Washington. And if I want to drive for ~15-20 min: Shoreline, Rancho San Antonio, Baylands.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > a strip mall as the only place to go I don't get why so many in the comments think suburbs only have strip malls as the places to go. I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. In my current suburb almost all of these kinds of features are connected by separate bike trails and transit. There's a city park at the end of my suburban street with pavilions, playgrounds, a fishing pond with a dock/platform in it with picnic tables, picnic tables and grills dotting the tree line, a paved running trail, and a few different sports fields. No driving, not a long walk. This is the experience for pretty much my whole suburban city, not some one-off thing.
    - tzs 3y ago
      > I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. Indeed, that suburbs offered better access to many of those things than did cities (especially poor parts of cities) used to be one of the big arguments offered against suburbs. The argument was that suburbs had those things due to racism--suburbs were mostly white and so governments built those things in the suburbs.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        The suburb I'm talking about is less white than the national average, by a significant margin. (50% versus 75%)
      - RestlessMind 3y ago
        The suburbs where we live, white people are a minority. And they have all the great stuff GP mentioned.
    - neuromanser 3y ago
      > I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. Any grocery stores? Cafes? Restaurants? Bars?
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    Don't they have community centers and parks in basically all of suburban US?
  - RestlessMind 3y ago
    > most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. You haven't really lived in US suburbs then. I live in one and within 0.6-0.8 mile radius, we have 3-4 parks and 2-3 libraries. Within 15-20 min driving distance, we have amazing parks. We meet other people regularly in such places without having to buy anything. And thanks to California weather, those are accessible except when it is raining. So please stop your FUD.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    > I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. The place where I grew up had a town center with offices above shops, and plenty of open areas for people to gather; it was designed for being a "third space." Then (a few years before COVID), it went under new management who was livid that so many people were spending time there without shopping and they did various things to make it much less desirable to go there if you aren't shopping. About 30% of the stores/restaurants went out of business in a year. Turns out, for the right sized pies, a large slice of a smaller pie is worse than a small slice of a larger pie.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  ? we have public open spaces as large as some EU nations feel free to tally up parkland in North America by acreage vs the EU...
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    I think he means communal spaces in densely populated urban areas, not national parks and forests that are remote enough to keep most of the antisocial scum away. Take for instance, Pioneer Square in Seattle. If you look at the structure of the parks, buildings, sidewalks and streets it should be very nice. Lots of nice trees, wide sidewalks and it's pretty flat and easy to walk around. But in reality it's filled with awful people which ruins it.
- panzagl 3y ago
  Mostly because we can't drink there.
- et-al 3y ago
  That's because they don't turn a profit, or enough of it to justify the rent. American third spaces used to be bowling alleys, community centers, and Elks / Masonic Lodges. There's a shift away from those and now our third spaces are gyms, McDonald's, and malls. Wherever old people congregate is a de facto third space. https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-people-police-20140115-story.html https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-p... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-stars/406192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-st...
- xyzelement 3y ago
  What does this mean? I recently moved from NYC to a near-suburb. My town has parks, a library, a band-shell, a town pool, a few synagogues and churches, etc. Unlike NYC living, I actually know the people I run into in these places. This seems pretty typical for small towns - what are Americans missing out on in terms of communal spaces, in your opinion?
throwawa14223 3y ago
3rd places have been politically co-oped. The best we can do is defund them.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Not coopted, privatized. There are surprisingly few places one can go in the US without the expectation of spending money
  - huytersd 3y ago
    That’s not what the GP is talking about. It’s some right wing talking point about how libraries have books about minorities.
    - throwawa14223 3y ago
      In my area it is usually the right being disruptive but it isn't wholly unique to the right.
  - throwawa14223 3y ago
    People have a strong preference for privatized spaces because truly public spaces are unfit for purpose. A coffee shop has a right to kick out protesters that a town square is lacking, as one of many examples. People value that lack of disruption in a very noticeable way.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      In most of the world, most of the time, people peacefully coexist in public places with little or no disruption. If a person insists on zero disruption, they likely will avoid shared spaces all together, since even shared private spaces can't provide protection from all disruption all of the time.
    - pyuser583 3y ago
      Yep. California Courts ruled there is a right to defecate on the street in public. Why deal with that when coffee costs $5?
juliend2 3y ago
Thanks for mentionning it. I just found this interesting wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place This is not common concept to me neither.
the_biot 3y ago
[flagged]
- lm28469 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    > Or you know, we had different lives and it made us have different opinions. They said “from a European perspective”. A Minnesotan would probably get upset if a Floridian said that living in a humid, tropical climate was the American experience (directly or indirectly).
    - lm28469 3y ago
      > They said “from a European perspective”. And so what ? As if being born and raised in Paris would be the same as bumfuck nowhere Poland The EU is nowhere close to homogenous, there are more differences between Spain and Slovakia than between any two US state
      - avgcorrection 3y ago
        Exactly.
- JWLong 3y ago
  Okay. Here is similar propaganda from an American source https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI?si=HP0eaph7OnWPPFXB https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI?si=HP0eaph7OnWPPFXB
- pjc50 3y ago
  Classic internet-culture comment, telling someone their own lived experience is propaganda.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Thing is there are enough people who lived at several places and have real experiences and funded opinions.. some say there exist even people who do this kind of objective studies, etc. Crazy world! No need to stick and believe in bubbles, it seems.
Kalium 3y ago
The issue with third spaces in the US is making and keeping them fit for purpose. When they tend to be commercialized, squatted on, or otherwise put to exclusive use they are often no longer useful third spaces. What we tend to have is third spaces that are policed in some manner. Often by commerce, as that does a pretty good job of keeping away those considered undesirable without literally calling police. Some call this privatization, which is accurate but overlooks that the money-based gating of access is a key feature.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Commerce doesn’t do away with the undesirables. Target sees theft get higher they respond by putting the deodorant under lock and key and keep the same staffing level.
  - Kalium 3y ago
    Target isn't really a Third Space in this context. Starbucks is.
oceanplexian 3y ago
I live in an admittedly more rural part of the USA but one of the things I love doing is hopping in my Jeep and going out into the many thousands of miles of off-road wilderness to camp, go shooting, or go for a hike, where more often than not I never have to interact with another human being. My "quality of life" is 1000% better than if I required a crowded train to take me to an urban "communal space" in order to enjoy nature.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Move to Ottawa Canada to get the best of both works. Gatineau Park, which contains hundreds of kilometers of wilderness trails is 3 miles from the Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa, population 1 million. You'll meet people at the trail head but it's easy to hike 20 km without seeing another. https://www.google.com/search?q=gatineau+park&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=gatineau+park&tbm=isch
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  If you work a "normal" job eg one that requires proximity to people this is basically a role play lifestyle. Subsidized by the cheap gas and roads that make personal vehicle use affordable. We'd all love to cut out to nature at will, and we should build infrastructure that does allow us all to.
- conjecTech 3y ago
  That is not the alternative being discussed here. 80% of the US population is urban. We could not undo that without a huge degradation is quality of life. Cities are incredible engines for wealth creation. The alternative more or less imposed by law is suburbs that don't have access to communal space or nature.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    // The alternative more or less imposed by law What do you mean imposed by law?
    - 3y ago
98codes 3y ago
This isn't news, it's a press release, complete with CEO glamour shot.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Agreed that it's a press release, but as somebody who desperately wants this, I'm very glad to see it.
sershe 3y ago
How does the concept of the 3rd place combine with walkability? I actually am not a particular fan of most 3rd places, but ok, I used to love to pop out to play soccer outside of my flat, or walk to a local bar for board games, but on the other hand there was no escape if I wanted to open a window in summer and a loud soccer game was going on, or if there was a late night party at the bar. These days, I like climbing so (in urban context) I drive to the gym, and I drive to a library (or take an uber/sometimes bus to a bar) if I want to play boardgames. I still have the 3rd places, but I don't have to live next to them.

HPsquared 3y ago

I think a lot of people in the US see the communal spaces as a lost cause.

bombcar 3y ago
I think a lot of people in the US refuse to see as "communal spaces" what lots of other people in the US use as their communal spaces.
acabal 3y ago
I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out. Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?
- PopAlongKid 3y ago
  > most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. They all know what a park/playground is
  - acabal 3y ago
    Playgrounds require you to have children with you - for example I don't think it would be socially acceptable for a group of unaccompanied adults to show up to a playground and sip some beers while they chat amongst themselves, like you might do in a public plaza in Europe. Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Most parks with playgrounds in America are, by area, 90% park and 10% playground. Or something roughly like that; the playgrounds are designated areas tucked away into some corner of the parks. Except you're probably not allowed to drink beer there anyway, because a law against drinking in the park provides a convenient excuse to keep the park clear of homeless so everybody else can enjoy it.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Its usually not literally just a playground. Its usually a whole park which happens to have a playground or two. For instance, this last weekend I went to a park with some adult friends which had playgrounds, but we were there for the disc golf. There were other adults having some kind of cookout at the grills and picnic tables. There were adults playing soccer in one of the fields. Then yes, there were kids and parents at the playgrounds. The vast majority of parks I see around me aren't just a playground. Those mostly seem pretty rare.
    - RestlessMind 3y ago
      > But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. Reality disagrees with you. Just search for parks on Google maps for SV and you will see so many where playgrounds are just a small part and the rest of the park is for everyone - https://www.google.com/maps/ https://www.google.com/maps/ My favorite ones: Las Palmas, Cuesta, Washington. And if I want to drive for ~15-20 min: Shoreline, Rancho San Antonio, Baylands.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > a strip mall as the only place to go I don't get why so many in the comments think suburbs only have strip malls as the places to go. I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. In my current suburb almost all of these kinds of features are connected by separate bike trails and transit. There's a city park at the end of my suburban street with pavilions, playgrounds, a fishing pond with a dock/platform in it with picnic tables, picnic tables and grills dotting the tree line, a paved running trail, and a few different sports fields. No driving, not a long walk. This is the experience for pretty much my whole suburban city, not some one-off thing.
  - tzs 3y ago
    > I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. Indeed, that suburbs offered better access to many of those things than did cities (especially poor parts of cities) used to be one of the big arguments offered against suburbs. The argument was that suburbs had those things due to racism--suburbs were mostly white and so governments built those things in the suburbs.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      The suburb I'm talking about is less white than the national average, by a significant margin. (50% versus 75%)
    - RestlessMind 3y ago
      The suburbs where we live, white people are a minority. And they have all the great stuff GP mentioned.
  - neuromanser 3y ago
    > I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. Any grocery stores? Cafes? Restaurants? Bars?
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Don't they have community centers and parks in basically all of suburban US?
- RestlessMind 3y ago
  > most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. You haven't really lived in US suburbs then. I live in one and within 0.6-0.8 mile radius, we have 3-4 parks and 2-3 libraries. Within 15-20 min driving distance, we have amazing parks. We meet other people regularly in such places without having to buy anything. And thanks to California weather, those are accessible except when it is raining. So please stop your FUD.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  > I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is. The place where I grew up had a town center with offices above shops, and plenty of open areas for people to gather; it was designed for being a "third space." Then (a few years before COVID), it went under new management who was livid that so many people were spending time there without shopping and they did various things to make it much less desirable to go there if you aren't shopping. About 30% of the stores/restaurants went out of business in a year. Turns out, for the right sized pies, a large slice of a smaller pie is worse than a small slice of a larger pie.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
? we have public open spaces as large as some EU nations feel free to tally up parkland in North America by acreage vs the EU...
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I think he means communal spaces in densely populated urban areas, not national parks and forests that are remote enough to keep most of the antisocial scum away. Take for instance, Pioneer Square in Seattle. If you look at the structure of the parks, buildings, sidewalks and streets it should be very nice. Lots of nice trees, wide sidewalks and it's pretty flat and easy to walk around. But in reality it's filled with awful people which ruins it.
panzagl 3y ago
Mostly because we can't drink there.
et-al 3y ago
That's because they don't turn a profit, or enough of it to justify the rent. American third spaces used to be bowling alleys, community centers, and Elks / Masonic Lodges. There's a shift away from those and now our third spaces are gyms, McDonald's, and malls. Wherever old people congregate is a de facto third space. https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-people-police-20140115-story.html https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-p... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-stars/406192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-st...
xyzelement 3y ago
What does this mean? I recently moved from NYC to a near-suburb. My town has parks, a library, a band-shell, a town pool, a few synagogues and churches, etc. Unlike NYC living, I actually know the people I run into in these places. This seems pretty typical for small towns - what are Americans missing out on in terms of communal spaces, in your opinion?

throwawa14223 3y ago

3rd places have been politically co-oped. The best we can do is defund them.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Not coopted, privatized. There are surprisingly few places one can go in the US without the expectation of spending money
- huytersd 3y ago
  That’s not what the GP is talking about. It’s some right wing talking point about how libraries have books about minorities.
  - throwawa14223 3y ago
    In my area it is usually the right being disruptive but it isn't wholly unique to the right.
- throwawa14223 3y ago
  People have a strong preference for privatized spaces because truly public spaces are unfit for purpose. A coffee shop has a right to kick out protesters that a town square is lacking, as one of many examples. People value that lack of disruption in a very noticeable way.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    In most of the world, most of the time, people peacefully coexist in public places with little or no disruption. If a person insists on zero disruption, they likely will avoid shared spaces all together, since even shared private spaces can't provide protection from all disruption all of the time.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Yep. California Courts ruled there is a right to defecate on the street in public. Why deal with that when coffee costs $5?

juliend2 3y ago

Thanks for mentionning it. I just found this interesting wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place This is not common concept to me neither.

the_biot 3y ago

[flagged]

lm28469 3y ago
[flagged]
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  > Or you know, we had different lives and it made us have different opinions. They said “from a European perspective”. A Minnesotan would probably get upset if a Floridian said that living in a humid, tropical climate was the American experience (directly or indirectly).
  - lm28469 3y ago
    > They said “from a European perspective”. And so what ? As if being born and raised in Paris would be the same as bumfuck nowhere Poland The EU is nowhere close to homogenous, there are more differences between Spain and Slovakia than between any two US state
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      Exactly.
JWLong 3y ago
Okay. Here is similar propaganda from an American source https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI?si=HP0eaph7OnWPPFXB https://youtu.be/tI3kkk2JdoI?si=HP0eaph7OnWPPFXB
pjc50 3y ago
Classic internet-culture comment, telling someone their own lived experience is propaganda.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
Thing is there are enough people who lived at several places and have real experiences and funded opinions.. some say there exist even people who do this kind of objective studies, etc. Crazy world! No need to stick and believe in bubbles, it seems.

Kalium 3y ago

The issue with third spaces in the US is making and keeping them fit for purpose. When they tend to be commercialized, squatted on, or otherwise put to exclusive use they are often no longer useful third spaces. What we tend to have is third spaces that are policed in some manner. Often by commerce, as that does a pretty good job of keeping away those considered undesirable without literally calling police. Some call this privatization, which is accurate but overlooks that the money-based gating of access is a key feature.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Commerce doesn’t do away with the undesirables. Target sees theft get higher they respond by putting the deodorant under lock and key and keep the same staffing level.
- Kalium 3y ago
  Target isn't really a Third Space in this context. Starbucks is.

oceanplexian 3y ago

I live in an admittedly more rural part of the USA but one of the things I love doing is hopping in my Jeep and going out into the many thousands of miles of off-road wilderness to camp, go shooting, or go for a hike, where more often than not I never have to interact with another human being. My "quality of life" is 1000% better than if I required a crowded train to take me to an urban "communal space" in order to enjoy nature.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Move to Ottawa Canada to get the best of both works. Gatineau Park, which contains hundreds of kilometers of wilderness trails is 3 miles from the Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa, population 1 million. You'll meet people at the trail head but it's easy to hike 20 km without seeing another. https://www.google.com/search?q=gatineau+park&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=gatineau+park&tbm=isch
giraffe_lady 3y ago
If you work a "normal" job eg one that requires proximity to people this is basically a role play lifestyle. Subsidized by the cheap gas and roads that make personal vehicle use affordable. We'd all love to cut out to nature at will, and we should build infrastructure that does allow us all to.
conjecTech 3y ago
That is not the alternative being discussed here. 80% of the US population is urban. We could not undo that without a huge degradation is quality of life. Cities are incredible engines for wealth creation. The alternative more or less imposed by law is suburbs that don't have access to communal space or nature.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  // The alternative more or less imposed by law What do you mean imposed by law?
  - 3y ago

98codes 3y ago

This isn't news, it's a press release, complete with CEO glamour shot.

epistasis 3y ago
Agreed that it's a press release, but as somebody who desperately wants this, I'm very glad to see it.

sershe 3y ago

How does the concept of the 3rd place combine with walkability? I actually am not a particular fan of most 3rd places, but ok, I used to love to pop out to play soccer outside of my flat, or walk to a local bar for board games, but on the other hand there was no escape if I wanted to open a window in summer and a loud soccer game was going on, or if there was a late night party at the bar. These days, I like climbing so (in urban context) I drive to the gym, and I drive to a library (or take an uber/sometimes bus to a bar) if I want to play boardgames. I still have the 3rd places, but I don't have to live next to them.