Turning indoor public spaces into vibrant third places
A low hanging fruit to activate urban life all year round
There are no great cities without great public spaces. Life in parks, streets, plazas, etc. is what makes cities unique. The vibrancy, spontaneous interactions and diversity you find in places like Piazza Navona in Rome, Covent Garden in London or Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech are not only key to cities’ attractiveness, they are also necessary ingredients for urban resilience. Yet, while many cities in the northern hemisphere have thriving public spaces during summer, they take it as a given, that people will seek refuge indoors and often in commercial spaces during the winter.
But this can change. Even though effective design, architecture and policy principles could help strengthen life in public spaces during winter (you can read more about it here: A vision for a livable Winter City), it would be unrealistic to argue that it’d be enough to bring the same vibrancy as when sun is shining — and it might not even be desirable.
However, one thing that could be done is to untap the potential of indoor public spaces. Cities have several public facilities such as libraries, recess centers, cultural houses, even churches (when they are state-owned), which could be used to support a thriving public life during the cold months. What would it take to transform them into communal third places? Places where people could hang out, mingle, play and chat, have a drink maybe,… In other words, a network of indoor meeting places, whose design, policies and offers will seek to accommodate the needs of everybody, just like outdoor public spaces do. We argue that there are three main principles for creating such communal third spaces: provide access, monitor them and make them social.
ACCESS: The technology is here and sharing cities have started using it
In 2013 already, Seoul started an initiative called Sharing City Seoul, aiming at solving major social problems and being the world’s leading sharing metropolis. The project is one of Mayor Won-soon Park’s political signature, and, as such, he wanted the City to pave the way to a different way of doing things. Since the launch of the Sharing City initiative, residents can for example book online and use public facilities such as conference rooms, lecture halls, and camping sites during idle hours for events, meetings and more. According to one of the project leaders, in 2017 only, the service has been used an overwhelming 13,8 million times in 1,233 locations!
Amsterdam, who is Europe’s front runner on the sharing economy scene, is pursuing a comparable agenda. In 2016, as part of the municipality’s action plan on the sharing economy, a pilot project has been launched, whose aim is to grant citizens access to underused city-owned meeting rooms. The project is still limited in scope and very little communication has been made so far, partly because the municipality needs to deal with legal issues. A critical point to address, is for example for the City to be able to provide this service while avoiding unfair competition with companies renting out office space. This is why, at the moment, only organisations which are working with a social purpose can use the space.
The market for such solutions is expanding as online booking platforms and smart lock technologies make it technically feasible to optimise the use of spaces at a big scale. It is indeed conceivable to let users book from distance and access any unused rooms. Several start-ups — such as ShareDesk, Gæst, Office riders or Flextila — thus provide mobile workers opportunities to book flexible workplaces. Office riders for example is following the same model as Airbnb, with individuals renting out underused spaces to professional workers and businesses looking for alternative workspaces.
From a municipal perspective, those technologies are a major leverage in order to optimise the use of existing city-owned facilities and to democratise the access of what could become communal third places.
MONITOR: Understanding life in public and third places
While it is widely acknowledged that public spaces are crucial for cities and urban life, our knowledge about the use of such places is rather limited. The methods and tools which are used to document public life haven’t evolved the last decades. Hand counting and infrared sensors are still common practices to get a sense of what is happening in parks, plazas and streets. In parallel, while so-called third places have been popping up all around Europe, there has been neither a systematic gathering of use data nor a detailed analysis of best practices and succèss criteria during the recent years.
It is thus a challenge to make informed decisions regarding the planning, development, programming and other improvements in public and third spaces. Innovative digital solutions and use of data are however showing ways to better understand common areas. New urban furnitures, equipped with sensors, have notably emerged the last years. The strawberry smart bench for example, is equipped with sensors for CO2, noise, temperature, humidity and air pressure. Other solutions rely on crowdsourcing to get a better picture of people’s activities and movements. This is the case with the app CounterPoint, where users are incentivized to report and detail which modes of transports the people around them are using (is it a bike, a cargo bike? Is there a baby chair on it? etc.). On a social level, different applications — such as MoodMap — seek to provide a subjective picture of cities based on people sharing information about their moods.
Municipalities are starting to understand how those tools could be relevant for them. While there is an obvious need to collect new data for public spaces, we argue that building metrics for indoor third places could be just as powerful a tool.
SOCIAL: Activating indoor public spaces
Public spaces, whether indoor or outdoor, are a frame, a piece of architecture, whose properties make it more or less likely to create “stickiness” for people. When looking to create inclusive and thriving communal third places, a very inspiring example is Absalon in Copenhagen.
Located in the heart of the hip neighbourhood of Vesterbro in Copenhagen, Absalon is not your usual church. Lennart Lajboschitz, who founded the concept store Tiger, bought it in 2014 and transformed it into a “people’s house”. His ambition? Creating a place that would strengthen social ties and where everybody would feel welcome.
In order to build a sense of belonging and accommodate everybody’s needs, the people behind the project have adopted a set of principles. For one thing, they have let users decide what they wanted to find in the house in terms of activities. A typical week now includes for example yoga, capoeira, dance classes, bridge meetings, ping-pong tournaments, knitting gatherings, film quizzes,… All kinds of events are planned during the weekends and people can come to communal eating every evening. Though all those activities take place, one can also just drop by and hang out.
A lot of thought is given to sending the right signals. There are for example no signs written in the negative form and no visible rules. The Absalon’s team is visible, they have recognizable t-shirts, are often available to talk with people coming by and they give the same importance to all users. In some ways, one could argue that they have used trust and equality as their design principles. The team also has a clear vision about what they want to achieve with the house and they constantly seek to adjust their way of working in order to stick to it, especially if they can notice new patterns of use.
While such an initiative is very inspiring, it is also extremely consuming in terms of resources and manpower, and cities won’t have the means to create comparable communal third spaces in all their facilities. Digital technologies could however be used as a leverage to create a scalable model. Lulu dans ma rue is a good example of that. It is a network of local kiosks, which relies on “connectors” and a digital platform to match residents who need a hand with others who can help with manual work, babysittings, sewing, watering plants, etc. The same principles could be used to support a network of dynamic third places in a city. A “host” could be hired to welcome people in the different public indoor facilities and part of his role would also be to animate a network of local actors who could be activated to set up different events, pop-up activities, etc.
OurHub is developping comparable principles. The vision for the physical hubs is that they will function as meeting points where locals will get an opportunity for a great experience. The digital platform linked to the hub aims at strengthening and facilitating opportunities for spontaneous encounters around them.
Combining the right design principles with digital technologies could open the door to new practices in terms of activating indoor public spaces.
ACCESS, MONITOR, SOCIAL: Give Copenhageners the key to the City’s third places
In Copenhagen, as mentioned in an earlier post, citizens can access most libraries and other facilities such as sports halls, using their social security card, after opening hours. Meeting rooms in culture houses and recess centers can be booked online and some of those spaces can be accessed by local residents with the same card. In this way, it is more than empty words, when the libraries’ website explains: you own the key to the City.
While it is a fantastic opportunity, it could be taken a step further and contribute to Copenhagen’s uniqueness. The technology and the spaces are here. What is missing now is a comprehensive vision and action plan, that would make the network of indoor public spaces visible, systematise citizens’ access and develop an ambitious programming to activate them and attract people. In this way, they could become communal third spaces. From a political and a city branding point of view, this vision of open, livable and thriving third places would contribute both to optimising existing infrastructure and to a vibrant public life all year round.
A pre-requisite will be of course for the different departments in charge of the facilities to work together to implement this vision and build a common communication campaign. Part of this work would be to map all existing spaces to create a tangible vision at a city’s scale of all third spaces. The iconic map of Nolli, representing the Rome during the roman Empire and showing all public spaces accessible in the city, whether public spaces or public buildings, is a great inspiration.
Indoor public spaces in Copenhagen have the potential to become true third places and provide the basis for a strong public life all year round. The spaces are there, now they need to be revealed as a network, to be activated, and their use needs to be monitored in a systematic way.
Please feel free to reach out at caroline@sharinglab.dk
