Patricia Mou's The Commons, based in San Francisco, exemplifies the Fourth Space concept. It describes itself as “a place of pause between stimulus and response”, where individuals can explore meaning, question paradigms and grow within a supportive community fabric.

For the last few years, I built and ran a space in Brooklyn called Highside Workshop. It was a multipurpose space that hosted everything from concerts to art galleries to motorcycle repair workshops to tattoo popups. I don’t know how many events we ran, but I’d guess pushing a hundred, and there were constantly people coming in and out for band... See more

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