why third spaces are sacred

If we don't have real third places, what do we have instead? Oldenburg calls what we have as non-places. In real places, a human being is a unique individual person. In non-places, individuality disappears and you're either a customer, a client, an address to be billed, or a car to be parked. Places have now mostly been reduced to consumerism.

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With TV, we at least understood ourselves to be passive observers of the screen, but the interactive nature of the internet fostered the illusion that message boards, Discord servers, and Twitter feeds are digital “places” where we can in fact hang out. If nothing else, this is a trick that gets us to stick around longer. A better analogy for

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Third places offer the most reliable forms of friendship. There's this Chinese proverb, "A humble friend in the same village is better than 16 influential brothers in the royal palace." Basically it's saying that one of the most important characteristics that friends can possess is availability. Third places make friendship easy, and when we lose

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It’s true that walking through central London in 2024 can feel like navigating a bleak, postmodern satire of the thrills of urban spontaneity: ballpit bars and escape rooms for contrived office socials; expensive, ticketed mega-events; and security guards cosplaying as cops, moving civilians on from heavily surveilled POPS, or privately-owned

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A new trend is sweeping through China's first-tier cities — the "homebar." Imagine a cozy living room where strangers gather, break the ice, and enjoy a relaxed drinking experience. It's not as noisy as a bar, nor as posh as a quiet lounge, but something uniquely in-between.

Born in Shanghai and spreading to cities like Beijing and Hangzhou,... See more

There are indeed few places for teenagers to hang out outside of the home. Skate parks are being turned into pickleball courts with “no loitering” signs, malls are shuttering and you can no longer spend $1 on a McChicken to justify hanging out in the McDonald’s dining area for hours. But as the Atlantic piece explains, the dwindling of places to be... See more

Already in the 1800s, brands were quick to seize the burgeoning urban landscapes as fertile grounds for reaching an expansive audience, a strategy later employed by brands such as Coca-Cola with their iconic billboards at the beginning of the 20th century.

Hand in hand with the evolution of humans and their quintessential living space, brands today... See more

Part of the reason for the shift is that over the course of the 20th century, leisure started to become privatized. Rich Heyman, an American studies professor at the University of Texas told "The Atlantic" that, "As living conditions improved, people chose to sit with their nuclear families in front of televisions." But I guess at least the family

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