Third places are created and vanish every day. But the more we recognize their presence and power in growing and sustaining a sense of community, the more we can do to protect them. 

1. This syllabus first introduces and explores third place’s socio-spatial origins. 
2. It then leads the reader to study visual arts-driven interventions with the liminal space we can create when we challenge and reform how humans use and adapt to ‘place’.
3. We then find ourselves gravitating to the story and legacy of a demolished bargain goods store in Toronto, Canada, to consider how commercial, private, and public spaces can become integral third places, exploring the idea of cultural belonging in vernacular and even industrial landscapes.
4. We end the syllabus with a more radical approach, considering the concept of making space where we are not supposed to ‘exist’. We will explore this concept with two unique examples: guerilla urban gardening and cultural production in abandoned housing.

What is a third place?

Think of a place where you felt at home, but were not at home. A place where you felt belonging, peace, ease, joy—the purest of human emotions and needs. As you follow this text, think about that space in your mind. The rule here is that it has to be a place you and others share; a common space.

In the most basic sense, a third place is somewhere people gather that is neither the home (first place) nor for labor (second place). There is a certain magic to third places. They subvert barriers and boundaries we often accept, expanding limitations we unknowingly perpetuate. Third places exist in the in-between, a space both liminal and seemingly permanent and tangible. They are both the site of connection but also the connection itself.

Third places have become rather complicated, however, because space is everything in a rapidly developing and declining earthly existence. One’s access to land and resources bestows this seemingly untouchable power in civic decision-making. This is something which colonizers and gentrifiers have long taken advantage of. But as we enter this world of late-stage capitalism, we seem ever dependent on social hierarchies to function, no matter the detriment to overall well-being, sustainability, and efficiency. Third places offer a radically different approach to space: they utilize space as something we can all to contribute to. Power generated from third places is formed in community.

The phrase ‘third place’ was coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Oldenburg observed the unique ability of certain kinds of places (like coffee shops, pubs, and cafes) to build relationships and connect individuals differently than formal spaces that relied on traditional social structures. There are some key characteristics Oldenburg identifies that third places possess: they are neutral, a social leveler, conversational, accessible, familiar, low-profile, playful, and lastly, garner a feeling of home.

Oldenburg, while Western-centric in his case studies, explored the significance of third places from a socio-economic and public health standpoint. For example, he observed the sense of humor and perspective that third places offered to community members through the social support these spaces nurtured.

Often paired with Oldenburg’s influential text is Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) by Robert Putnam. Putnam, trained as a political scientist, approaches the complex topic of neighborhoods and community sustainability from a more critical perspective, considering the evolution and deterioration of civic life and social connections, like knowing one’s neighbors, and how it all affects us today. Putnam himself never quite identified the concept of third places. Instead, Putnam focused on the term ‘social capital’—the inherent value of social relationships for self and community, a term created by Enlightenment thinkers over 150 years ago.

We would be remiss to forget Jane Jacobs alongside Oldenburg and Putnam. An early influencer of public space and community-led design, Jacobs helped shape the trajectory of social geography. She may be most well known for her successful fight against NYC planner Robert Moses, who proposed building a highway through Lower Manhattan. Jacobs authored countless essays, articles, and books, her most famous publication being The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In Jacobs’ shrewd eyes, she sees it as our duty to protect the unique authenticity of place from developers, corporate greed, and the like, because it shapes our lives, our way of being. Without a sense of place, we cannot truly exist.

The Arts’ Ability to Construct Liminal Places

What are modern-day applications of third place theory and advocacy? You may have encountered the terms placemaking or placekeeping and wondered how these newer initiatives connect to third place. They seek to provide sustainable processes and actions to create or maintain third places. 

These initiatives come with their own set of baggage, as any top-down work does. In reality, often those creating place for community and reclaiming shared space are not nonprofits, universities, government agencies, or philanthropies, but organically-grown communities bonded by aligned values for a more equitable future. 

Nevertheless, cross-sector collaboration offers fascinating intersections to explore the potential of sustaining third places, particularly when studying the application of the visual arts. An excellent overview of this work can be found in “Creating Healthy Communities Through Cross-Sector Collaboration,” an easy-to-read white paper published by the University of Florida in 2019. Essentially an argument for the arts’ role in supporting public health and the wellness of communities, the paper paints broader strokes about the connection between place and creative expression and why we need to pay attention to their overlaps.

The paper includes a series of case studies, and there is one in particular that drew me in, though each project is worth exploring further. Breathing Lights, an eight-month project that began in 2016 in the tri-city Capital region of New York State (Troy, Albany, and Schenectady), connected discourse surrounding housing, local politics, public art, and historic preservation. A partnership between artist and professor Adam Frelin and architect Barbara Nelson, with major funding from a Bloomberg grant, Breathing Lights decided to tackle one of the major issues in their region: abandoned homes. Frelin shared with me that there were some who opposed the concept of focusing on blighted landscapes, fearing it would hurt communities and represent the region in a poor light. However, the project did push through, working closely with community partners to create programming around the public art initiative.

The concept was simple (in theory): Adam wanted to make the homes feel alive with light growing brighter then dimmer, like a living being—giving a sense of life and warmth to the abandoned structures. While the project had its limitations, both in terms of technical logistics and sustainability, it had an impact in helping attendees recognize the effect of the places around them, and in doing so made a liminal third space for dialogue surrounding this region-wide public health issue. Frelin shared that it broke down traditional barriers between municipal government and community members, allowing more direct discourse which created room for intentional growth down the line.

You can watch a documentary about the project here: Documentary – Breathing Lights

Another visual arts project that exposes the visual arts’ power in third space discourse is the Community Curator Program at Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), based in Rochester, New York.

Different from Breathing Lights, the Community Curator Program occupies a semi-regular liminal space, developed from community-led collaboration with Visual Studies Workshop’s vast archival collection of documentary and experimental films. 

Tara Nelson, Curator and Director of Public Programs at VSW, founded the program in 2016 in response to the organization’s overflowing collection and the lack of public access to its works. Tara recognized the abundance of timely films that told histories of community and neighborhood activism, with many in the collection relevant to Rochester itself. Since its inception, the Community Curator Program has brought countless community organizations in the Rochester area to partner with VSW through a micro-grant program, where community organizations curate a screening selection and conversation around selected films. Tara shared it is an intensive process to explore and decide upon the curated films with community partners but an integral part of the program. Here, we experience a liminal third place in the screening event and partnership, that reconsiders who is participating in memory and who shapes the narrative in activating archives.

Third places can be any place: vernacular landscapes of belonging

We’ve talked about the theories behind third places and some of their modern applications, but what about the personal stories behind third places? After all, it is everyday places where most third places form.

Let me take you to Honest Ed’s, a bargain goods store that opened its doors in 1948 in Toronto, Canada. Owner Ed Mirvish was the son of immigrants, and soon became a hero to Toronto’s working-class immigrant communities in the 20th century.

Honest Ed’s resided in the Bloor St West neighborhood, a west-central area of Toronto known for its rich cultural scene and diverse residents, many of whom depended on Honest Ed’s as an affordable place to shop. My own father, who came to live in Toronto as a university student, bought some of his first clothes and socks as a new arrival to North America at Honest Ed’s. 

Mirvish Village developed around the store and became a space for artists and independent stores, with rent prices that were unheard of elsewhere in the city.  A place beloved by those young and old, Honest Ed’s was eclectic, silly, fun, and most of all, a place for all to feel at home. It was torn down for condo development in 2017. There was public outcry at its removal and a concerted effort to memorialize its significance to the neighborhood and city.

A temporary public art installation using the iconic signage and typography of Honest Ed’s advertising was installed at the subway station across the street. Folks lined up to buy the old signs, with thousands willing to wait their turn to take a piece of the store home with them.

Watch a 1984 commercial for Honest Ed’s here: Honest Ed’s 1984

New coverage as store closes (2016):
TTC pays tribute to Honest Ed’s – The Toronto Observer
Something Ed-citing is happening at Bathurst station . . .
Long queue of customers arrive for last shot at Honest Ed’s hand-painted signs

Toronto has faced rapid changes in the last few decades and is one of the fastest-growing cities in North America. When news of Honest Ed’s fate circulated, it was not surprising, but it hit differently, because it was, without a doubt, an authentic third place. It was not created as a recreation center, a pub or cafe or a library. It was a cheap and large discount goods store—yet its impact was immense. For many, it was about the ethos of the store more than the building (though the building was an icon in itself). Mrivish would give out free Christmas turkeys every year and folks would line up to receive them. He would host big block parties for his birthday and celebrate all day long in the streets. We all felt like we belonged at Honest Ed’s.

To learn more about this story, watch There’s No Place Like This Place, Any Place (2020), Lulu Wei’s documentary about the closing of Honest Ed’s, and the community response to what will be built in its absence. A strong figure in the film is the owner of a brown and black focused neighborhood bookstore, A Different Booklist, which has served the Bloor/Bathurst community for almost 30 years. Itah Sadu knows her social capital worth in the neighborhood and has fought to have a voice as the area changes with Honest Ed’s removal. Unlike many third places that shape community belonging, A Different Booklist shows us a proactive (not reactive) approach to sustaining their rightful place at Bloor and Bathurst. Identifying that their current location would be demolished with Honest Ed’s, they moved early on to a nearby location to stay rooted in the community.

Watch a clip from the documentary here: There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace | CBC Docs POV

Abolitionist Third Places—Making Space Where You’re Not Supposed To

What can we learn from third places that form where legality is in question, and where space is more tightly controlled? 

The following publications focus on two types of space that can easily become nurturing places—gardens and housing. 

Like zines, third places often exist on the outskirts of society, tending relationships that are often harder to form through traditional networks. And that can be their greatest advantage in evoking change. 

I often think about Susanna Grant and Rowan Spray’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, a booklet/zine published in partnership with the Garden Museum in the UK in 2021. The authors bring to the foreground the complexity of “community gardening” which is often paywalled, restricted to well-funded neighborhoods, or limited by space and policies of municipalities. This publication also reconsiders the idea of ‘weeds’ and how society has decided which plants are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’ even though many native ‘weeds’ have a plethora of uses.

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure and another central zine, Claire Tuna’s Fugitive Gardens: How to Grow Food on an NYC Fire Escape, introduced to me the concept of radical/fugitive/guerilla gardening. There are an array of fascinating research papers and articles about this topic as well as do-it-yourself toolkits available to explore on the web. Below are some resources to get you started:

Free Gardens: A Pratical Guide to Growing Food in Irregular Spaces
Radical Gardening – Lib Guide, Pratt Institute

Discourse on radical gardening provides us with a deeper lens to understanding third places. It shows us how place and space are contested, but also how obeying law and order to access public space is an odd and somewhat hypocritical process. We as humans occupy space naturally, but gardening is incredibly regimented, particularly for folks with lack of access to green space. Often, guerilla gardening is happening in abandoned lots that wait for their future use but are home to a rich ecology of birds, insects, and soil. Left for years, they are ideal spaces for growing edible plants in a sustainable, neighborhood-oriented way. While it may be technically illegal to garden in these lots, it is both natural and sensible.

Similar creative methods for using discarded or overlooked space to construct third places are witnessed in a collection of essays entitled Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces, published by Other Forms. With most case studies centered on late 20th-century Europe, the essays explore artist networks producing works in abandoned buildings—living outside the norms of society in a collective manner difficult to find elsewhere. Often creating art that directly responds to their changing landscapes, Making Room invites us to consider a future where the concept of public versus private space is abolished and social connection is not determined by access to place.

CONCLUSION

Third place is a term used to open our minds to the communities and spaces where we feel a lightness for life and where our voices matter. 

As a cultural heritage professional, I can argue that preserving historic buildings is a major avenue for sustaining third places—and in theory, this is often true. But third places are so much more than their tangible space—third places exist because there is a human dedication to nurturing the connection shared in those places. 

When you find a third place, hold it tight and fight for its rightful place in your town or city. Often, the strongest communities find their strength and direction in places they work together to sustain, because everyone has a story that ties them to that space and each other. Third places can ground us in what truly matters: connection and compassion. 

Some other books/films/media to check out:

Self-Determiniation: Takachizu (zine/booklet)
Takachizu is a project of Sustainable Little Tokyo (Los Angeles-based), initiated by +LAB, LTSC’s creative community development strategy utilizing collaboration and experimentation to advance Little Tokyo’s power over its future.

Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home & Community in a Global Age by Timothy Beatley (book)

Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place by Edward S.Casey (1993) (book)

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) (film), Director Joe Talbot

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? (2005), Essays, Edited by David & Bruce Rutledge (book)

Third Places is referenced in Coerced Experience: Writing the Non-Place by Tyler Thier.