Recognizing and narrating our cities’ ordinary places of sociability, friendship, and community life.
In an urban environment, every individual and community seeks out places of attachment and proximity to practice sociability, cultivate friendships, exchange freely with others and construct individual and collective thought.
Ordinary places of sociability in our neighborhoods (bars, cafés, public benches, squares, barbershops, parks, etc.) are not always recognized, valued, or protected by planning practices and policies. Their "sociability value" is not always visible to those who are not their regular users.
Inspired by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg's 1989 notion of "third place", which refers to these regular places of sociability distinct from home and work, urbz Paris has started in 2024 the Third Place Project: a participatory inquiry to discover, through the eyes of their regular users, and narrate, through a diversity of creative productions, our cities' everyday places of sociability.
French version below.