Group items tagged

An interesting thought piece on the issues around third places.  What is the etiquette of using a third place, particularly when it is a place of business? Lingering vs. loitering?

We've heard this kind of description of a cafe as third place, but I loved this phrase: "European-styled place, with hints of grandma"

The vaunted "third space" isn't home, and isn't work-it's more like the living room of society at large.  It's a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect.  It's a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection.  It's a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle. And nine times out of ten, it's a bar.

My friend and former colleague, Max van Balgooy, suggests in his latest blog that museums can serve as "third spaces" to allow a safe place for diverse people to discuss and explore sensitive issues, such as those arising from Ferguson and related events. While we often think of "third spaces" being places for like-minded folks to gather informally, should they also provide a place to safely voice hurt and anger. What do you think about this interpretation of "third spaces?"

great places ("you know them when you see them" as we say in our baseline report) are listed in 3 categories: neighborhoods, streets and public places.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

Social media app uses idea of "third place" (not Facebook and not MySpace) to create your digital home.

interesting-- will have to check this out.. (I did quick peek-- might be a pseudo dating platform?!) BUT could be an interesting analog for self-organizing meetings inside museums

What are the places that draw people together and create a sense of community? They want a way to feel connected to other people in the place that they share.

Nothing in California made the list of Great Places, but maybe we can help change that!

From the blog: How do we "design for strangers"? Can people be "alone" and "together" just as easily in a space? From a comments: "we talk so much about the activities and the look and feel of places and don't spend nearly enough time thinking about the sound of a place"

New media technology provides a "Third Space" where some Muslims who are using social media to contest gender assumptions, normative aspects of religious practice, and cultural experience. In this context, YouTube offers such a space as an informal meeting place to create community and to express new identities.

Interesting! And great to know about in the context of our soon-to-launch online exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women's Art & Voices.

Smarter travel combined with alternative working practices could ease strains on infrastructure and transport and turn cities into smarter places to work and live.

"I'm still looking for someone to generate a 'lingering index' so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out - but that's really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn't forget it."

This article suggests to me that senior centers need to be re-thought. Seniors want to be in the thick of things even if they are just sitting with friends over luke-warm coffee. Enter the museum's third place...

Interesting thought piece as we get ready for CAM and the 3rd Spaces session.  Are museums more like the library as 3rd space or the one described at the end of the article?

human infrastructure essential to successful urban places.

The paper, Places in the Making, casts aside the idea of the monolithic expert, and argues clearly and cohesively for the importance of Placemaking as a vital part of community-building, rather than a fuzzy "extra."

An extremely insightful blog post about how different generations tend often to have opposing viewpoints about sharing their experiences in "sacred places" through social media.

Very interesting. I think this is going to make me self-conscious about taking pictures at historical sites of all kinds.