Rethinking Third Places

Ray Oldenburg’s concept of third place is re-visited in this book through contemporary approaches and new examples of third places. Third place is not your home (first place), not your work (second place), but those informal public places in which we interact with the people. Readers will come to understand the importance of third places and how they can be incorporated into urban design to offer places of interaction – promoting togetherness in an urbanised world of mobility and rapid change.

Ray Oldenburg's concept of third place is re-visited in this book through contemporary approaches and new examples of third places. Third place is not your home (first place), not your work (second place), but those informal public places in which we interact with the people. Readers will come to understand the importance of third places and how they can be incorporated into urban design to offer places of interaction - promoting togetherness in an urbanised world of mobility and rapid change.

Ray Oldenburg, coauthor of this book, is known for giving a name to a phenomenon seen throughout history: the third place. Third places are social gathering spots, distinct from home (the first place) and work (the second place). Traditional third places are havens of sociability where conversation is the main activity and conviviality prevails. They include cafes, coffee shops, tea houses, beauty parlors, general stores, taverns, parks, street corners, and all the other places where we come together.In the post-pandemic age, the concept of the third place is being adapted, and promoted, around the world. The term is used by developers and town planners, by social workers and coworking entrepreneurs. Social media platforms are sometimes described as online third places. But what is a true third place?This book sets out the defining features of a third place and provides a wide variety of examples. Oldenburg's analysis of the effects of zoning is intended to promote fresh thinking about livable and walkable communities. The authors show how third places are related to social infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and libraries. They also provide specific ideas about how to assess, sustain, rebuild, and strengthen the third places that make us happier and healthier, strengthen democracy, and enable us to live sustainably.

Current planning and design modes of cities are facing challenges of philosophy and form. Past approaches no longer sustain new demands and call for innovative thinking. In a world that is becoming highly urbanized, the need for a new outlook is propelled by fundamental global changes that touch upon environmental, economic and social aspects. The book introduces fundamental principles of timely sustainable urban design, paying attention to architecture, integration of natural features, public urban spaces and their successful use. Readers will learn how cities are transitioning to active mobility by placing the wellbeing of citizens at the heart of planning; making buildings fit nature; supporting local culture through preservation; and including community gardens in neighborhoods, among others. Written by a practicing architect, professor and author, the book is richly illustrated and features meticulously selected international case studies.

The spread of newly 'invented' places, such as theme parks, shopping malls and revamped historic areas, necessitates a redefinition of the concept of 'place' from an architectural perspective. In this interdisciplinary work, these invented places are categorized according to the different phenomenological experiences they are able to provide. The book explores how such 'cloning spaces' use placemaking and placemarketing in attempt to replicate the characteristics found in urban spaces traditionally viewed as successful, and how these places can affect society's environmental perception. A range of international empirical studies illustrates how such invented places can be perceived as legitimate urban spaces, and contribute towards the quality of life in today's cities.

Providing a thorough reassessment of our understanding of politics in Third World societies, this book contains some of the liveliest and most original analyses to have been published in recent years. The severity of the political and economic crisis throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s has highlighted the inadequacy of existing political science theories and the urgent need to provide new paradigms for the 1990s.

This volume discusses how different geographical spaces can enhance or hinder the capacity of a variety of organizational settings to achieve economic value creation in the pursuit of sustainable regional development. In order to provide the most comprehensive picture of new sources of value creation for sustainable transitions, the book collects contributions that tackle this issue from a variety of perspectives, and adopts a systemic approach where macro, meso and micro-levels of analysis are intertwined in three sections. This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach comes from scholars operating in the fields of planning, economic geography, social entrepreneurship and organizational management. The first section of the book adopts a macro-level approach linking sustainability to the regional development theme, and addresses how organizations work between different social interests to produce outcomes not previously realized. The second section of the book focuses on the spatial dimensions of sustainable development, with particular clusters, industrial districts and regions considered as relevant units of analysis (meso-level analysis). The third section of the book is dedicated to a micro-level approach, illustrating how to drive social entrepreneurship activities, which are based upon sustainable business models centered in the creation of a shared value. The book is geared towards scholars working on sustainable development issues intersecting the disciplines of regional studies, economic geography and management, and will appeal to geographers and researchers in economic development, business innovation, and sustainability transitions.

Nationwide, more and more entrepreneurs are committing themselves to creating and running "third places," also known as "great good places." In his landmark work, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg identified, portrayed, and promoted those third places. Now, more than ten years after the original publication of that book, the time has come to celebrate the many third places that dot the American landscape and foster civic life. With 20 black-and-white photographs, Celebrating the Third Place brings together fifteen firsthand accounts by proprietors of third places, as well as appreciations by fans who have made spending time at these hangouts a regular part of their lives. Among the establishments profiled are a shopping center in Seattle, a three-hundred-year-old tavern in Washington, D.C., a garden shop in Amherst, Massachusetts, a coffeehouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan, and a restaurant in San Francisco.