Third Places

Gathering places that are neither home nor work: cafes, bookstores, pubs, parks, main streets. In the saved material the idea shows up in three registers: as a catalogue of historical forms, as a product niche for the remote-work era, and as the amenity that makes a small town worth living in.

• A catalogue of forms. Patricia Mou frames them as “homes outside of home”: places of refuge where people eat, relax and commune, so as to develop a sense of belonging to a place. Her thread lists bookstore-cafes in Asia, the French sidewalk cafe, bathhouses and hot springs, German-American lager beer gardens, Main Street, Chinese urban parks, the English pub, the Asian tea house and the classic coffeehouse. She notes that from 1973 the shopping mall began to replace Main Street as the core of community belonging in many American small cities (It’s Time to Build More… (tweet)).
• A product niche. Andreas Klinger sketches a gap between coworking, community space and coffeeshop: “a coffeeshop brand run like a gym”, with monthly membership, cheaper non-prime real estate, a casual community area, several phone booths and remote workers as the target (Agree w @darrenbuckner There is… (tweet); see Coworking).
• A town-building ingredient. Nat Eliason’s announcement that he was growing a historic town near Austin for creators listed new housing, a coworking cafe and a boutique hotel as year-one projects (Announcement! My New Work Focus… (tweet)).
• A small-town amenity. Making Small Towns Viable — Borrowing the City’s Optionality counts third places among the amenities people move to cities for, and argues that zoning which bans walkable mixed-use main streets caps the density needed to support them. Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town reports a Steubenville neighbor calling BookMarx a “perfect third place”, and Crafts and Hobbies Are Winning the Battle for Americans’ Paychecks treats hobby communities as a counterpart to in-person gathering places.

Where this appears

• Tweets: It’s Time to Build More… (tweet), Agree w @darrenbuckner There is… (tweet), Announcement! My New Work Focus… (tweet)
• Concepts: Making Small Towns Viable — Borrowing the City’s Optionality
• Long reads: Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town, Crafts and Hobbies Are Winning the Battle for Americans’ Paychecks