What are third spaces and what makes them work

Edition no 8. Date 25 May 2026
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One thing I enjoy doing is grabbing a cappuccino and a croissant at my favourite coffee shop in the city centre. While I'm here, I’ll likely meet friends or acquaintances without planning. We’ll chat, debate local topics, and enjoy the coffee and atmosphere.
Some will call this euromaxxing, but for me, this is what a third space looks like: a place to meet new people, connect with friendly faces, and exchange ideas.

The concept of third spaces was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1970s. In his view, a third space is a social gathering environment different from the first space, the home, where private life happens, and the second space, the workplace, where professional life takes place.

These third spaces act as anchors for community life because they provide space for broader, creative, and informal connections.

In Oldenburg’s vision, a true third space has the following characteristics:

• Is a neutral ground, meaning it’s a public, freely accessible place.

• Facilitates a conversation that is typically good and relaxed.

• Has regulars which will attract newcomers, keep the place alive, and set the tone and vibe.

• Is an accessible space: has long hours, and is accommodating different needs (from dietary options, to environmental noise, to access options)

• It is a levelling place, meaning commonality is more important than social or economic status.

• It is homey, meaning it’s a safe, warm, intimate space.

Looking at these characteristics, a third space can be bars, cafes, bookstores, libraries, but also public spaces like parks, gardens, community centres. We can include here churches and other religious places, with the caveat that they are more rigid in their acceptance of others and in their neutrality.

Oldenburg argued that the third space is a solution for loneliness, political polarisation and community resilience.
Think about it: a bookshop hosts a book club. The acceptance is relaxed, it’s a safe space, people are having conversations around books, and the club has regulars. Not all of those people will have the same hobbies or the same backgrounds, but they will interact, connect, and discover new opinions. They will develop a sense of belonging, they will have their preconceptions challenged, and, hopefully, they will become more curious and tolerant.

In a recent French analysis, the researchers analysed the closure of 18,000 local bars (bars-tabacs in French) and the legislative and presidential election results over twenty-five years. The findings showed that the closure of bar-tabacs contributed to the rise of far-right voting, independently of immigration, unemployment, or other economic indicators. On the other hand, the opening of local bars was associated with a decrease in far-right voting. It goes to show that third spaces can work as a political equaliser.

Okay, what about digital spaces then?

When we’re building a community in the fourth space, aka, the digital space, we can’t just simply duplicate offline behaviours and rituals. The digital world promised a new level of connection and connectivity. But all this created a new set of problems for which we’re not fully prepared: misinformation, polarisation, information overload, trolling, echo chambers, and alienation.

Let’s look at the characteristics mentioned before and see how we can “translate” them into digital.

First on the list is the neutral ground. This is a bit hard to fulfil with online tools like Facebook Groups, Discord, Slack, because each of them follows a business agenda and moderation rules. One solution is to have control over the entire tech stack of your community: you host your community/forum tool (like Discourse or Talkyard), your email tools, and moderation tools.

The characteristic of regulars differs in an online brand or product community.
In real life, an observer would have all members of a third space participate in the conversation, even if he could place them on a linear scale, with newcomers at one end and regulars at the other. In digital spaces, roles are more defined:

• Ambassadors- people who support and promote the community;

• Helpers- the ones that are active in helping newcomers understand the rules, the tone, and the vibe of the space/community;

• Lurkers- the ones that don’t actively participate in the conversation, but see value in being silent participants and occasionally active.

• The Butterflies- people who join a space, participate for a limited time, and then disappear.
  In a real-life scenario, the conversation will self-regulate, without members needing to actively sense the group dynamics or facilitate the changes. But in a digital space, you’ll need to account for each scenario and create rituals to facilitate the interactions that would happen intuitively in real life.

We’ll treat the rest of the characteristics together because they influence each other, and, in a digital space, we don’t have the same social cues, micro expressions, and interactions to drive them.

To create an accessible space where relaxed, meaningful conversations can happen between equal members, your digital space needs to have clear rules about what counts as bad behaviour, how moderation happens, how members are involved in the space, and how their opinions are taken into account. You can have clear rules from the start, especially if it’s a brand community where different regulations are imposing guidelines, or you can build a Code of Conduct organically as the space grows. It depends on your own goals how you want to tackle this. My recommendation is to have a minimal viable guideline before something bad happens. It will save you a lot of stress and frustration.

Building a third or fourth space involves being present, open-minded, and part of the conversation. Ask the others what they like, what they don’t, and how, together, you can make the space one that everyone will return to.

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Recommendations

• Check the website maintained by the author and Oldenburg’s collaborator, Karen Christensen. Interviews, media appearances, and news.

• The French research on the local bars and far-right voting.

• The European Correspondent made a short video presenting the research.

• On May 5, 1958, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” at a conference at the University of British Columbia. This is an astrological read of that day, via The McLuhan newsletter.

• An album from the Japanese-French-German jazz trio, Shinya Fukumori Trio. For those quiet moments.

Let’s work together

When I can help you or your team, get in touch here. I do:

• Information and content architecture: Audit and solve problems for websites, communities and services, and design solutions and processes that work for the long term.

• Training and workshops: presentations, hands-on workshops, one-on-one mentoring in information architecture, knowledge management, marketing strategy and community design.

• Free (!) coffee consultations: I keep 2 hours a week in my calendar free for people I don’t work with, to talk about their most important topics.

The same principles on third spaces also guided me when I created the Startup Founders community: create a sense of belonging, have a digital place as an extension of the brick-and-mortar one, and create a structure for conversations to happen freely.