Third Places: Easy Streets
An aptly named bar in Decorah, Iowa. If you're a you, you belong. Well done, Decorah.
Third places root us in our neighborhoods by being located conveniently to our homes and open early and late. When these places are easy to access, folks start or end or break up their days there, unwinding from stresses of home or the office or, nowadays, the home office.
For all our talk of mental health these days, third places, and the short walk or bike ride they require to visit, can be an antidote.
This is where I workout in Ames, our City of Ames Community Center Gymnasium.
I call it The People's Gym. It's affordable, centrally located in our city hall right downtown, and offers programming for all ages, abilities, backgrounds. Best place in town.
the Devil’s in the Details
Here’s the twofold rub.
First, as I mentioned before, post-WWII city planning championed the car over the feet (yay to large garages and boo to sidewalks) and pro-suburban zoning laws often privilege house-only neighborhoods that are, in the words of sociologst Ray Oldenberg, “bereft of life.”
Second, up until very recently, wealthy American houses are outfitted with more and more private amenities, like their very own swimming pools and tennis courts and home gyms, creating self-contained, Disney-World-like compounds.
If we have no reason to leave the house - because we’re already got craft beer on tap in our basement or if the coffee shop is closed or the bookstore requires us to brave the interstate - then we often don’t leave the house.
The pandemic entrenched this.
And yet we know from the pandemic, that not leaving the house can make us sad and insufferable.
Why? Because when we run into acquaintances regularly (that guy you always see grabbing coffee, the neighbor you see walking the dog, the cashier at the grocery store), we gain access to more knowledge, perspectives, and information (in the form of job opportunities or local news) and we increase our happiness and well-being, all of which leads to greater individual creativity.
Convenience isn’t always better, especially at a collective level. We know this from a health perspective - think McDonald’s. It’s also true from a social standpoint, so much so that researchers Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman wrote a book on how “consequential strangers are as vital to our well-being, growth, and day-to-day existence as family and close friends.”
A Vicious Cycle
And this “convenience of the private compound” becomes a vicious cycle. If folks, for example, have their own pool and fewer relationships with consequential strangers, they may not see the point in supporting bond measures or tax dollars to fund a community pool.
If every member of the family has their own vehicle, why fund public transportation and sidewalks?
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how a lack of funding for third spaces further reduces the chance of interacting with consequential strangers in the first place.
Husband Aaron and crazy Muddy harassing our neighbors and their puppy on a walk.
But All is never lost
Let’s say you live in a stereotypical suburban neighborhood where you literally have to get into a car to go anywhere indoors and in public. Walking to a get a beer ain’t gonna happen without risking your life traversing Highway 30.
Here’s where walking-for-walking-sake can be third-place-esque, but only if you leave your headphones and phone at home.
When I asked Husband Aaron about his third places , he said that walking Muddy, our lunatic big yellow dog, in our neighborhood has become his middle-age social connection. The two of them have a definite route, they see the same folks, they keep tabs on what houses are for sale, and which college-kid house has the weirdest parking habits, etc. Walking Muddy has definitely integrated us into Campustown in ways that I hadn’t appreciated until I thought about it a little.
We have literally never bought this animal a tennis ball. He pilfers on the reg.