Introducing "The Fourth Place" & Why "Third Places" Have Fallen Short on Their Promise

T he best third places are rec centers and libraries. Modern third places need to offer transformation, not just transaction. While cafes have become laptop farms, gyms and libraries remain sacred spaces for the body and the mind.

For our community, the pandemic was an inflection point in the latent sense of disconnection that had been simmering for a generation. We awoke from the fever dream of Covid to find that the city had transformed around us, offering no shortage of trendy spaces to photograph a perfect matcha latte or sip a $25 dirty martini. But amid this abundance ... See more

outside of their dwellings, many people are currently inhabiting the smaller pockets of space in and around their neighbourhoods: local parks, even just copses or patches of grass or playgrounds; the street corners (talking at a safe distance) of diverse, scaled-well high streets, that can actually speak to and articulate the local communities they... See more