Third Places

Perhaps third places like cafes, bars, salons, and the public spaces aforementioned, can continue existing as spaces with lite community vibes. But to illuminate a new category of community third spaces that strive to go deeper, we’ll need to create with more intention and concoct a new name.

Let’s call it the “fourth place.”

We have homes as first... See more

Patricia Mou • introducing "the fourth place" & why "third places" have fallen short on their promise

Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit—indeed, to encourage—the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted.” If we see fourth places as a microcosm of a city, how could we design... See more

Patricia Mou • introducing "the fourth place" & why "third places" have fallen short on their promise

What is the purpose of cities?

“daily life, in order to be relaxed and fulfilling, must find its balance in three realms of experience. One is domestic, a second is gainful or productive, and the third is inclusively sociable, offering both the basis of community and the celebration of it. Each of these realms of human experience is built on associations and relationships

In his 1995 book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, French anthropologist Marc Augé defines "non-places" as spaces of transience that lack sufficient meaning to be considered genuine "anthropological places". Unlike traditional places, which are rich with historical memory, social relations, and identity, non-places are... See more

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The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time.

Allie Conti • We Really Should Hang Out More Often

On Becoming a Place
Yesterday, as I biked past the Seawolf Bakery on my way home from the gym, I was hit, as I often am when I pass this spot in the evenings, with the rich intoxicating scent of yeasty, rising cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls that aren’t quite cinnamon rolls yet. The smell filled the street. It was inescapable—so all-encompassing that

“When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell. Wandering freely, we garner landmarks, presences, ecological awareness, a sense of kithship. Our brains and our hearts alike gather this knowledge as we become intimate with the

Over time, the word “kith” has been twisted in meaning and lost its distinctiveness.

When kith and kin first started to be combined in the late fourteenth century, they were understood as country and kinsfolk. Just as kith and kin is a plural idiom, so it enclosed a plurality of meanings: home, place, neighbours, friends, family. Then, as is the way

“Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place—the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.”

―Lyanda Lynn