Third Places

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

“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 approp

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

interstitial places—places that were neither purely private nor purely public and that were free from political and economic forces (Oldenburg 1999)

“The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life. The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job, and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. American life-styles, for all the

“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