On "Third Place"

In a thought provoking TED talk, award winning architect Ellen Dunham Jones articulates the goals of a new movement in American planning, one to "retrofit suburbia" with the trappings of urban life. This includes the conversion of strip malls and office parks (bankrupted by the recession) into art galleries, libraries, places of worship, community buildings and other thriving centers of suburban culture. The next stage involves active reworking of sprawl environments into walkable mainstreets, complete with public spaces for creative or political expression.

A key concept that stuck with me was Jones' reference to the idea of a "third place" first articulated by Florida sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Where home and work are the first and second places, the Third Place is where civic identity takes shape, social lives are cultivated and culture is produced and shared. Emaciating the Third Place, as has happened in suburbs across America, means isolating citizens, forcing them into costly auto-dependency, and restricting them to television and digital spaces to fill the social vacuum. 

Suburban architecture may spell the end of a healthy social life, but the consequences for a viable democratic society are far more acute. In his analysis of mobilizations of the Civil Rights era, Moldova and contemporary Iran, Malcolm Gladwell describes the limits of social media in single handedly redirecting the course of political events (and the dangers of relying on it to do so). Ultimately, it is physical networks, predominantly created through face to face interactions in the Third Place, that are key to any successful mobilization.

This phenomenon is nowhere more directly observable than in Cairo's Tahrir (Liberation) Square, where protesters have created a unique social order shaped by the  intersection between political mass action and public space. And regardless of all the social, economic and or regional factors that have gone into this uprising, it is ultimately the mechanics of actual street demonstrations that have played the largest role in shaping Egypt's dramatic revolution (see here for a planning perspective on Cairo).