The second coming of third place

There’s a puff of romance in the air when it comes to post-pandemic work. For the privileged, naturally. A life of wandering; without roots, ties or obligations, ‘wherever I lay my macbook, that’s my home’. Always passing through, engaging with curiosity, but fleeting contact nonetheless. It’s been born of a dual realisation that freedom is possible, and of how little we actually need in living in such a manner. Yet the expectation is that all those touch points have a permanence that allow our freedom to be enjoyed. If everyone was nowhere, no-one would be.

When we were essentially office-based for most or all of the week, the ‘third place’ was a ubiquitous idea. It conjured an immediate refuge from carpet-tiled hallways, close enough to be accessible but far away enough to feel free. For most, it meant a metropolitan café, where we fought for space at sticky tables with freelancers nursing a latte until the milk curdled and, heaven forbid, actual coffee drinkers.

While there were some loose references to the notion of a ‘third place’ prior to 1989 — ‘first place’ being home and the ‘second place’ being the physical place of work — the term was given its modern meaning by American urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his seminal work, The Great Good Place. This was followed a decade later by Celebrating the Third Place. It’s important to note here we’re talking about third place and not third space, the latter merely being a component, a piece of the jigsaw, as we shall explore. I wrote to him once, hoping to talk to him about his work — he never replied.

Oldenburg never offered the third place up as a workplace, and saw it as distinct. Almost an antidote. But as technology became ever more portable we realised we could viably use them for this purpose. That’s also the point at which everyone ceased to bother with the original thinking (which never happens, does it?) and just daubed everywhere that wasn’t a desk a third place. We even had claims that offices themselves included third places.

The third place — “the people’s own remedy for stress, loneliness and alienation” — is far from a residual collection. For Oldenburg it’s a place with specific qualifying characteristics from which its relevance is derived. He saw them as being “anchors of community” in our “jangled and fragmented” lives (sound relevant today?), comprising locations including cafés, pubs, restaurants, shops, hair salons and bookshops. Even parks and street corners.

We have examples in popular culture preceding Oldenburg’s work. While it’s easy for the mind to go to the comedy series Cheers (1982–93), as it’s the most obvious of the genre, a bar, think more the seminal 1995 film Smoke and (less well-received) follow-up Blue in the Face, centred on a cigar shop in Brooklyn.

Having heroically resisted the erosion of community from urban planners, the internet, high street retail chains, the obsession with the car and the resultant routing of highways through town centres, and the replacement of the “community hour” (the time between leaving the workplace and arriving home) with the commute — “the former warmed us to our fellow human beings, the latter conditions us to hate them” — then came Covid.

The pandemic has rather suspended the habitation of third places in many cities, driven both by periods of lockdown and, when lifted, by a marginal return to urban centres. Some has spilled (more probably, dribbled) into local centres, but essentially the debate over the most appropriate location for our endeavours remains a face-off between first (home) and second place (corporate or flex).

It could be that Oldenburg’s original work emerges as one of the most important workplace texts ever written. Timing is everything. It’s worth revisiting his eight common and essential features of a third place, where I’ve separated one into two and added a tenth. They seem to have a renewed relevance in terms of what we’re seeking from a place to work, and appear today to be incredibly progressive when we apply them to the second place:

• Neutral — we have no obligation to be there, it’s neutral ground. It’s the sort of space that baffles planners as it has no pre-determined use. They are “places where individuals may come and go as they please, in which none are required to play host, and in which all feel at home and are comfortable”. It resonates with a word of choice of place of work. And of resisting the temptation to ascribe workplace a specific purpose, in case it manages to do something unexpected.
• Levelling — status is irrelevant and there are no requirements to be met in order to be there. It mitigates against rank and class-based associations. Yet it also asks that we bring our social, engaging self, rather than our troubles. It’s not a place to unload.
• Conversational — neutral ground having defined the space and levelling having set the stage, the activity that most defines a third place is conversation. Not heads-down focus, albeit there may be an occasional need (and a setting) for it. But respectful, open, spirited and inquisitive dialogue. Everyone contributes. Boorish behaviour is unwelcome.
• Accessible — ease of getting there (without a car). This chimes with the idea of a more distributed portfolio and the ’15-minute city’. Locality also ensures familiarity of attendees, rather than an endless trail of transient one-timers.
• Accommodating — provides for patrons needs and patrons feel their needs are met. Character and allure emanates from attendance being “unplanned, unscheduled, unorganised and unstructured”. Unlike work until the pandemic struck, but now somewhat similar.
• Familiar — regulars set the tone and bring and attract newcomers — not management. Their mood and manner, not the quantity. The visitor becomes a regular when trust is established — which takes time. And how much do we now talk about trust?
• Low profile — homely and unassuming, without pretence — “typically plain”. More to do with an informal atmosphere, rather than the aesthetic, prompting authentic behaviour. In being so they discourage both pretention and transience. They remove self-consciousness and inhibition. We come as we are, and find it as it is.
• Playful — witty, without hostility or tension. The idea of a playful mood — where “joy and acceptance reign over anxiety and alienation” — is far more endearing that the nauseating corporate ‘fun at work’. It’s instinctive and natural, rather than artificial and forced. Or even enforced.
• Home away from home — a feeling of belonging, a warmth, yet very clearly not home nor trying to mimic it. Vision, purpose, mission, values and all that associated corporate gloop, transcended by a sense that we’re entirely welcome and are a vital part of it.
• Diverse — Oldenburg implied this and wove it through his model, but it warrants specific reference in this age. Common factors other than interests bring people into third places, such as company, ambience, location, refreshment. They welcome unlikely members. In this way they differ greatly from social media spaces, that have been referred to as ‘fourth place’, typically characterised by interest-led bubbles.

It’s fair to say that some cowork spaces have attempted to embody the spirit and actuality of the ten characteristics. Yet in recent year they have been somewhat swamped by flexspace and ‘space as a service’ with its real estate industry backing. ‘Space’ as a service may be both possible and desirable — but ‘place as a service’ can’t be bought as the investment required is not cash, but character. To this extent there is probably a greater divide than ever between the two as distinct ideas.

As an aspiration for a meaningful future, the broader workplace could usefully look no further than to be an active ‘anchor of community’ — and to consider the ten characteristics as essential to offering a renewed reason to be present as the pre-Covid expectation and compulsion fall away. They might then also encourage greater use of, and value being placed in, the third places that are so vital to our urban environments.

Oldenburg clearly saw the third place as an antidote to the physical workplace, the entire opposite. Perhaps it’s time to see them as essential to one another. That they may grow and thrive together. Where all ‘place’ is welcoming and lifts our spirits. Who wouldn’t want that?