Celebrating the Third Place - ed. Ray Oldenburg

Celebrating the Third Place by Ray Oldenburg

If you’re like most Americans, you divide your time between two main locations: home and work. But if you’re like Ray Oldenburg’s ideal citizen, you add one more locale to the mix, enhancing your quality of life—you add a third place.

A “third place,” a term previously foreign to me, describes a place—be it a coffeehouse, a bookstore, or, believe it or not, a prison—where individuals can feel community and safety, where they can be themselves, where true social interaction can occur.

Oldenburg’s first book, The Great Good Place, is frequently referenced in this sequel, which is a sort of how-to book in examples. Celebrating the Third Place tells the stories of nineteen Great Good Places, told by those who have created or experienced the environments. There’s a taco place in California, a tavern in Washington, D.C., a passport shop in Miami. Each case claims to flesh out the principle of Oldenburg’s philosophy: people need community, and they need it badly.

Some of the stories are positively endearing: at the Coffee Beanery in Rochester, Michigan, for example, a professor holds class, training her students to speak in public by actually making them speak in public. She then instructs them to seek out third places of their own by picking a place, returning there every week at the same time to order the same thing and sit in the same spot. She chronicles the interactions and experiences of her students, who then form friendships and overcome anxieties.

True, some stories in the book seem more political in the independently-owned--store--v.--bastion-of-consumerism plotlines. And as I’ve never had a problem with shopping at Wal-mart or other superstores, I was a hard sell on this point. I like the deals, I like the late hours and accessibility. But what Celebrating the Third Place seems to say is that these same superpowers are squelching community; they are making people anonymous bodies instead of faces to be known.

It’s an interesting concept, the third place. And if nothing else, it forces me to do some thinking. In my neat world of suburban living, the interactions I have with people, quite honestly, come only when I want them to: I can avoid socialization in restaurants by ordering carry-out or zipping through a drive-through; in shopping, I can order online or over the phone; and in church, I can beeline for the door as soon as the closing prayer is said.

But, the book repeatedly asserts, we humans were made to need each other. We were made to interact. As one of my old teachers used to say, “It’s [meaning life, ministry, etc.] all about people.” In essence, what Oldenburg wants is for us to build relationships, support our communities, and, I would add, to salt our society—and of that, I do need to be reminded.

Shanna