Places of sociability, friendship, and togetherness: a new category of local heritage?
With the help of urbanists, friends, students, artists… we started in 2024 the Third Place or Troisième Lieu Project (a literal translation to French of Oldenburg’s concept): an ongoing participatory inquiry aimed at discovering and recognizing the existing third places through the eyes of their regular users. Starting in Greater Paris where we are based, and expanding to other cities and environments, we ask fellow city-dwellers to tell us (through workshops, interviews, recordings, photos, texts, poems…) about their own favorite third place: a place they go to regularly, where they feel comfortable, and where they meet up with friends or socialize with people. Then we will narrate them through creative productions: fanzines, fictions, illustrations, podcasts, short films…
Cafés, local bars, bistros… the typology of third places that Oldenburg was primarily referring to, are strongly represented. But through the eyes of the users, we have been discovering endless forms of third places: people also mention squares, riverwalks, parks, pétanque strips, benches, public baths, gaming rooms, swimming pools, sport facilities… places that matter to them as regular settings of exchange, sociability, and friendship. They seem ordinary to an external eye, but if one looks closer, they have a special meaning for someone, because they represent the landscape and core setting of part of their social lives. Their significance might be invisible or overlooked by passers-by, institutions, municipalities, or urban planners, but for their regular users, their value is immense. Their friendship value or sociability value, as we could call this form of use value, makes them “homes away from home” to some people, vital for their individual well-being, and precious for a city and neighborhood’s public life.
We wonder whether these existing places get the attention they deserve in planning projects and public policies: a place’s friendship or sociability value is difficult to perceive, quantify or analyze, but it is very tangible for individuals and communities. Could places that constitute important settings of our social realm, and thus contribute to our mental and physical health, be considered as heritage, worthy of recognition, support, and protection? Can we define a new category of local heritage, linked to friendship, sociability, community, and “togetherness”?
/ the first troisième lieu fanzine is coming out in the summer. Available in print in some of our favorite third places in Paris (or on demand!). (In collaboration with Lucie Mesuret and Camille Boisaubert).
/ want to tell us about your special third place? write to us at 3e.lieu@urbz.net
/ we'd like to thank the Paris VIII students of the class "Art, culture et projet urbain", from the Master's Degree "Politiques et Gestion de la Culture en Europe", who realized photo-journals of their own third places, and whose images have been used to illustrate this article. Thanks to our talented friend Arthur Crestani who followed the project with us.
/ thanks to our friends and fellow Greater Parisians for our conversations and interviews about their third places.
/ project logo by Alma Dubois.
Note that the notion of tiers-lieu (the original and widely spread French translation of third place, increasingly recognized by French institutions) has come to refer to hybrid, associative spaces of collective production, cultural programming, experimentation in governance and participatory urbanism. Although they do offer room for sociability, and could be someone’s third place, the concept of third place we are exploring is broader: that is why we propose an alternative French translation for this project.