Considering the Third Places

The clos­ing of my local book­store has me think­ing about Third Places.

The “Third Place” is a con­cept intro­duced by Ray Old­en­burg in his book The Great Good Place. The basic con­cept is this: your First Place is your home, where you live and where inter­act with loved ones. Your Sec­ond Place is your work­place, where you wind of spend­ing most of your time on a daily basis, inter­act­ing with peers and co-workers. A Third Place is place where the com­mu­nity meets to engage in broader, more cre­ative activ­i­ties. These are the infor­mal meet­ing places where peo­ple gather; bars, cof­feeshops, and other hang­outs. Accord­ing to Old­en­burg, the best sorts of Third Places are free or inex­pen­sive, usu­ally have some sort of food or drink (but not always), are highly acces­si­ble, close to many of the peo­ple in the com­mu­nity, and usu­ally involve hav­ing reg­u­lars, the peo­ple who show up more often than others.

I have two Third Places that I enjoy. The first is the cof­feeshop on our local pub­lic square. It’s a mile from my home, has the free wifi that makes it pos­si­ble for me to work or do research, and all it costs me is a cup of cof­fee or two. The sec­ond is my local Bor­ders, which is where I go to relax, flip through new releases and graphic nov­els, and again, grab a cup of cof­fee. Sadly, my sec­ond one is going away.

The clos­ing of one of my Third Places and the con­ver­sa­tion I had with peo­ple sur­round­ing my pre­vi­ous post causes me to con­sider the future of Third Places in the age of the Inter­net. Some, like the cof­feeshop, thrive because of the free access and low bar­rier to entry. Some, like the book­store, are hav­ing their busi­ness model chal­lenged in such a way that they may not survive.

The sky is not falling; I am not wor­ried that Third Places will go away. Instead, I think they will not only thrive but also evolve. Imag­ine a local café that has a ver­sion of the Espresso Book Machine, a free wifi con­nec­tion to down­load eBooks, music, and watch movies, com­fort­able con­ver­sa­tion pits where peo­ple can gather to talk or surf/work using tablets or lap­tops. A cus­tomer could come in, grab their favorite food and drink, meet with friends, and, if they want to pick up the lat­est new release in hard­copy, scan a credit card into the book machine to have a cus­tom copy printed and bound while they wait. It’s not so far away…I’ve described what would hap­pen if you put a book print-on-demand machine inside our local Panera.

Even more inter­est­ing to me is what wifi has done to blur the lines between the Sec­ond Place and the Third Place. When I was work­ing from home, it was not unusual to find me at cof­feeshop, sit­ting for house and work­ing for my employer while being out in the com­mu­nity. I’ve seen this become more com­mon over the last decade…people work from these com­mu­nity places because they are nei­ther work nor home. Con­sider how many large com­pa­nies have on-campus Star­bucks. My cur­rent employer has an area we call Town Cen­ter, where peo­ple reg­u­larly hold busi­ness meet­ings, work on lap­tops on the cor­po­rate wifi, or sim­ply relax while on lunch. These places fos­ter a sense of com­mu­nity amongst a group of peo­ple who want more from their Sec­ond Place than a cubi­cle and a paycheck.

Our Third Places pro­vide com­fort with an ele­ment of fresh­ness and unpre­dictabil­ity. There is the pos­si­bil­ity for discovery…a new item on the menu, run­ning into friends unex­pect­edly, meet­ing some­one new and inter­est­ing. In a Third Place we can escape the pres­sure of the work place and the chores of home to sim­ply be and do, a stranger in a group of strangers, bound together by the need to be social.

Do you have a favorite Third Place? Where is it? Why do you go there? How do you think Third Places are changing?

(Spe­cial thanks to Lau­rel for the inspi­ra­tion for this article)

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.