What happened to the places where we used to meet people? The return of third places

There was a time when people went out without necessarily having something to do.

You went to the local café, walked through the square, sat on a bench or stopped somewhere in the neighbourhood. There wasn’t always a plan, and often you didn’t even know who you would find there.

You simply went.

Today, that idea almost feels unusual. We go out for dinner, to work out, to work, to shop, to see an exhibition or attend an event. We book a table, buy a ticket, choose an activity.

We have more places than ever to go, but perhaps fewer places where we can simply be.

And this is where an old idea suddenly feels very relevant again. The idea of third places.

What are third places and why do they matter?

In the 1980s, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg began using the term third place to describe spaces that were neither home nor work.

Home was the first place. Work was the second. The third place existed somewhere in between.

A neighbourhood café, a library, a park, a public square or a local club could become a third place when it allowed people to spend time together in an informal and spontaneous way.

You didn’t need to be friends. You didn’t even need to have something specific to do together. What mattered was the possibility of returning, recognising familiar faces and slowly becoming part of the same environment.

According to Oldenburg, these places encouraged informal encounters outside home and work. They were accessible, frequented by regulars but open to strangers, and conversation played an important role.

The point, then, wasn’t simply having a café near your home.

It was going back.

Sometimes getting to know someone simply means seeing them more than once

The local café probably wasn’t the most beautiful place in town. The chairs might have been uncomfortable, the décor slightly outdated and the coffee completely ordinary.

But you walked in and recognised someone.

The person behind the counter knew what you usually ordered. The person sitting nearby was the same one you had seen a few days earlier. Someone commented on a football match and someone else joined the conversation.

The strength of these places didn’t necessarily depend on what they offered.

It depended on repetition.

Going back to the same places meant seeing the same people again. Strangers became familiar faces and some of those familiar faces eventually became acquaintances.

Today we often assume that meeting new people requires doing something. Joining a class, attending an event, finding a hobby or organising a night out.

For a long time, that wasn’t always necessary.

Sometimes you just had to be there.

Our cities are full of places but not always opportunities to connect

Contemporary cities certainly don’t lack places where we can spend our time.

There are restaurants, cocktail bars, gyms, coworking spaces, shopping centres, cinemas, exhibitions, festivals and activities of every kind.

But many of these spaces have a very specific function.

At the gym, we exercise. At a coworking space, we work. At a restaurant, we eat. At a concert, we listen to music. At a class, we learn something.

Even our free time has become increasingly organised.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that cities have become less social. It does mean, however, that some of the situations in which relationships could develop without being planned have become less common.

Being surrounded by people doesn’t necessarily mean meeting them.

We can spend an entire day moving between public transport, the office, a café, the supermarket and the gym, crossing paths with hundreds of people without really speaking to any of them.

We constantly share spaces with strangers, but we have become very good at respecting an invisible distance.

When being in the same place is no longer enough

There is a very ordinary situation that illustrates this change perfectly.

You walk into a busy venue alone.

Technically, you are surrounded by potential conversations. In reality, you can sit at a table and spend the entire evening without speaking to anyone.

Not because you don’t want to meet new people.

There is simply a step missing.

Talking to someone at the next table can feel intrusive. Joining a group’s conversation can feel awkward. Being in the same venue doesn’t automatically give us a reason to speak to each other.

The physical place is still there.

What is sometimes missing is a context that makes crossing the distance between two strangers feel natural.

Perhaps this is one of the most interesting differences between traditional gathering places and many of the spaces we use today.

Why are we talking about third places again?

The idea of the third place is still used to explore the relationship between physical spaces, communities and social interaction.

The reason is fairly simple.

Home and work occupy a huge part of our lives, but they cannot be the only environments through which we build relationships.

We also need more informal spaces where we are not relatives, colleagues, customers or professionals.

We are simply people.

This doesn’t mean recreating exactly the same neighbourhood café that existed forty years ago. Our habits have changed, cities have changed and the way we connect with other people has changed too.

Perhaps the more interesting question is what those places allowed to happen and how we can recreate that function today.

What if we are now building meeting places backwards?

For a long time, the process was simple.

First there was a place. People started going there and, by returning regularly, they eventually got to know one another.

Today, the opposite can also happen.

First we find a reason to meet.

Then we choose where to meet.

Seen this way, technology doesn’t necessarily replace physical spaces. It can simply become the step that brings people into them.

A group, a community or an app can do something that once happened naturally by repeatedly visiting the same place. It can create the initial context that makes meeting someone new possible.

Then the digital part can stop being useful.

Because the real encounter happens somewhere else.

From digital to a real table

This is also where Tablo comes in.

The idea isn’t to create another digital space where people collect contacts or spend hours talking through a screen.

Tablo uses technology to bring people together in real life.

People who want to meet someone new can create a table or join an existing one in their city. Then they meet in person over dinner, drinks or a shared experience.

The digital part is mainly useful before the encounter.

It makes something feel natural that could otherwise be much harder in a venue full of strangers. Sitting at the same table knowing that nobody needs to invent an excuse to start talking.

Perhaps this is what makes new ways of socialising interesting.

They don’t necessarily try to replace the places we have lost. They can give the places that already exist a function we may have started to forget.

Bringing people together.

Third places haven’t disappeared. They are changing

It would probably be too easy to romanticise the past as a time when everyone talked to everyone and every public square felt like a community.

It wasn’t like that.

And there is no need to assume that everything that came afterwards is necessarily worse.

Cities have changed. Our routines have changed. Our habits have changed, along with the tools we use to discover people, places and experiences.

But the need underneath all of this seems remarkably similar.

We still need home.

We still need work.

But between the first and the second place, there is an enormous part of our lives.

The part where we can simply be people who haven’t met yet.

Perhaps our meeting places haven’t really disappeared.

We have simply started building them backwards.