Making Better Third Places
What is a third place and how do you make a great one?
Hello, and welcome to another Strong Towns Seacoast Newsletter, I hope that everyone had a great January and is getting ready for a fantastic February. For me, my wife’s cousin is visiting from Taiwan so we are enjoying her company and showing her around the seacoast while helping her accomplish her tourist tasks. The Lunar New Year is also coming up soon, and we are preparing for that and I wish you a Happy Year of the Dragon. In Mandarin Chinese you would say: “Xin nian kuai le”!
Meeting #6 Details
Saturday, February 17th 10:30AM - 12:00PM Dover Public Library Trustees Room
Our agenda for this upcoming meeting is to discuss last year’s presentation by the city for proposed changes to the Dover downtown area. You can find the details for the city’s plans on this page. The city held its first meeting for this project 10 years ago in January 2014 and while there has been progress, we haven’t seen the plan be put into action yet. Our hope at this next meeting is to find a small part of the plan that is both low-risk and low-cost and advocate the city to take action sooner. This process doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing, and if we take a lesson from Strong Towns we can recognize the benefits of incremental change. Hope to see you at the next meeting!
What is a Third Place?
Our topic for this newsletter is the concept of a “third place”, somewhere that isn’t your home, isn’t your work, but is a space available for you to hang out and spend time. This is not just a restaurant or the grocery store, because those locations don’t quite serve some of the functions of a good, quality third place. So, what do these things look like and why do we want them?
Today it is easy to be surrounded by people who are strangers, and not community. The primary reason for a third place is that they are good for building stronger communities and creating social cohesion. It is an location for a community to gather, meet, and get to know each other or at least see each other. A place where people can become regulars and integrate the location into their routines. Some examples would be a coffee shop, the library, a bookstore, or maybe your church.
Let’s talk about what makes a good third place, what are some ideal qualities?
No expectation of productivity - You can simply spend time here, whether it is reading a book or chatting with friends. Productivity isn’t shunned, but it isn’t expected because a third place is perfectly fine with your presence and doesn’t ask much of you to be there.
Social setting - Conversation and meeting people is welcome and the opportunity to interact, either directly or indirectly, with people from your community is part of the experience.
No invitation necessary - You shouldn’t need a reservation, membership, or to buy a ticket to get in. No one is hosting and people can come and go as they please which allows people from different social circles to mix.
Free or low cost - Arriving at this place should be an easy decision to make and participation shouldn’t be expensive.
Local to you - If you have to drive a ways to get there, chances it isn’t close enough to you to be convenient or for the people there to be a part of the community where you live. If we want our third places to help build stronger community it needs to be locally accessible to that community, and keeping it within walking distance is a great way to manage that.
A third place that I think about for myself is Flight Coffee of Dover. I can walk to it from my house, it is a welcoming environment with lots of locals and regulars, and I have gone there to meet people and play board games for a few hours with a pot of tea as the only cost. There are several others locations that I think would fill that need, but Flight is the one that I feel resonates the most with me. When my wife and I are visiting her home in Taiwan, the night markets function very well as third places.
So, what third places come to mind for you when you read this list?
Thanks for reading today’s newsletter and I hope you can attend our next meeting to discuss the planned changes for downtown Dover.