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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

• dymk 9mo ago
  Exactly this. Vote for representatives that want to build walkable cities, support small businesses, and want to build parks. Suburban sprawl sucks.
  • toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    This. I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community. Community is a function of distance, broadly speaking.
    • reaperducer 9mo ago
      I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community. There are lots of libraries with cafes, maker spaces, and more. Seattle is one. If yours doesn't, this is your wake-up call to get involved with your local library. Stop waiting for someone else to do things.
      • huhkerrf 9mo ago
        I'm willing to bet that the libraries near the person you're talking to have all but maybe a cafe. I mean, I've never seen a library in the US that didn't have internet access and a place to meet and that weren't nonprofit.
      • nereye 9mo ago
        Which Seattle library (am assuming you're referring to SPL/Seattle Public Library system) has a maker space? There is no maker space listed at https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/a-z-programs-and-services https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/a-z-programs-and-s.... Within KCLS, there are two public libraries that have maker spaces (AFAIK): Bellevue, Federal Way. PS this is not meant to be confrontational, would love it if there were more maker spaces in libraries (when have asked in the past, the usual answer is that they do not have enough space for it).
        • reaperducer 9mo ago
          No, the Seattle reference was for the cafe, not a maker space.
  • SoftTalker 9mo ago
    Suburban sprawl is not going to be "fixed" in anyones lifetime. But it doesn't have to be limiting. I grew up in a very typical suburban style neighborhood in the 1970s. Tract homes, lots of cul-de-sac streets. But neighbors talked to one another, kids played together, there were summer gatherings in those cul-de-sacs on the 4th of July or Labor Day. Don't think you have to live in some idealized fantasy land to go talk to your neighbors.
    • ecshafer 9mo ago
      I live in a suburban neighborhood with a couple bag ends, our neighborhood is pretty social. couple of neighborhood bbqs a year, kids all playing together every day, dinners, etc. It is quiet and not a lot of traffic with long term residents. I am not 100% on what exactly the key is for a town is, I think style matters, but Ive been in walkable neighborhoods without a good community, and non-walkable neighborhoods with one.
      • SoftTalker 9mo ago
        I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around. The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them. I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor obstacles.
        • johnpaulkiser 9mo ago
          How big were the lots? How far of a walk was the closest bar, grocery store, cafe? Do you have to walk onto someone's property to talk to them if they are sitting on the porch? I lived in a car dependent burb for 20+ years and would rarely, if ever, run into my neighbors out on the town. Living in a walkable neighborhood in a medium-low density city for under a year and I regularly run into my neighbors.
          • 9mo ago
  • BurningFrog 9mo ago
    Voting isn't going to fix this problem in our lifetimes. We need to do things ourselves.
  • eddieroger 9mo ago
    No it doesn't. I live in a planned neighborhood in the suburbs. I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood. And even if none of that existed, nothing has stopped me from being friends with my neighbors, or the parents of my kid's friends. The suburbs are a different model with tradeoffs, but they're also useful for periods and phases of life different from the ones served by urban settings.
    • stryan 9mo ago
      A planned neighborhood is technically by definition not suburban sprawl, as sprawl requires a lack of planning. On the other hand, I'd argue if you can do all of that (and said walking distance is under a mile[0]) you're not even in a suburb, you're in a dense enough location to be a town or small city. Unfortunately thanks to American zoning and planning it can be very difficult to know what your home area is actually considered and it makes this type of anecdotal evidence not particularly useful[1]. [0] A mile is essentially the farthest the average person will comfortable walk versus driving a car for travel that does not require carrying anything back. Once you add in carrying things (e.g. groceries) it drops to half a mile. Anything less dense than that and people won't want to walk, anything more dense than that and you're into standard city planning. [1] Assuming you're American of course and obviously I'm not about to ask you to dox yourself, considering this type of thing can vary right down to the neighbourhood level.
    • PaulHoule 9mo ago
      Urban environments blunt people's connection to other people too, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese If you pack people in too tight they just tune each other out.
      • huhkerrf 9mo ago
        I mean, the very first paragraph of your own link says: "However, subsequent investigations revealed that the extent of public apathy was exaggerated." and the second paragraph says, "Researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the Times article, and police interviews revealed that some witnesses had attempted to contact authorities."
  • tokioyoyo 9mo ago
    I live in probably the most walkable city in the world, but there are millions of lonely people here as well. From any of my observations, I can’t pinpoint to one single problem. It might be a composite effect of different things contributing to the easiness of being alone. Cultural skill that overtime gets eroded, and as less time people spend among others, it becomes even harder to go back.
• srean 9mo ago
  Yes. Our lopsided emphasis on individualism, our definition of economic efficiency that does not include the mental health value, these have been detrimental to our connections, roots, community, family etc. We said, let the mom and pop stores die, their replacements provide the same value but more efficiently. Let community bonds die they intrude upon our individual destiny. But we did not correctly account for the value provided by those that we chose to replace. So it is not surprising that we find ourselves here. Could it have played out any other way ? I doubt it. Our world is an underdamped system, so we will keep swinging towards the extremes, till we figure out how to get a critically damped system. The other serious problem is that the feedback system is so laggy, that's a biggy in feedback control loops.
  • LorenPechtel 9mo ago
    The world has become a much bigger place. You used to know who to avoid, the default was someone was acceptable. Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person.
    • tenacious_tuna 9mo ago
      > Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person. This seems a wild generalization to make, though I guess "be suspicious of newcomers" is a little biologically hardwired. What's your epistemology for believing "newcomers" are "the ones to avoid"?
      • LorenPechtel 9mo ago
        The problem is the bad guys move around a lot more than the good guys.
        • tenacious_tuna 9mo ago
          That's not an explanation, that's a restatement of the claim.
    • 9mo ago
• Aurornis 9mo ago
  The common retort is that these don't exist any more, but in my experience they're all over. If you have kids you start seeing them everywhere, too. They're not as classically romantic as an ancient Greek agora, but there are plenty of spaces. During the summer I'm probably at a different space 5 days a week with the kids after school. I think the real problem is that some people forget how to go places. It's so easy to do the routine of work -> dinner -> screen time -> sleep -> repeat that time vanishes from people. Whenever I hear people, usually young and single, complain that their 8 hour job leaves 0 hours in the day to do anything and they're too tired on the weekends to go out, it's always this: Their time is disappearing into their screens, which makes it feel like their only waking hours go to work. I try to give gentle nudges to help give people ideas, but none of them really want to hear that it's something they can change. It's just so easy to believe that life has thrust this situation upon us and there's nothing we can do about it.
  • kmeisthax 9mo ago
    Also, people forgot how to find places. If you're driving a car, places speed by too fast to see or remember (and it's dangerous to spend too much time looking at them). On Google, places are actively hidden from you for the sake of making the map look "cleaner". Every time I go downtown (on transit, not by car) I notice new shit that just doesn't exist on the map unless you specifically type in the name to get Google to admit that it exists.
    • immibis 9mo ago
      I noticed this the first time I took a walk by myself to the town center rather than letting my parents drive me there. You know the routine: drive to the mall parking lot, go and get the thing you're looking for, drive home. Well, I didn't have my own car and figured I could walk there (about an hour, so probably 2-3km, in a country that uses sidewalks). It's basically magical how much stuff you notice that you would just ignore when in the car, even as a passenger.
  • cybwraith 9mo ago
    > The common retort is that these don't exist any more Usually when I see the retort, its also with the understanding that 3rd places need to be free, or essentially free. If theres a significant expectation of money being spent in order to spend time there, its not really a “3rd place” by the intended definition. (Thats the argument I’ve seen)