As a kid growing up in Clayton County, Shannon Jones remembers his friends wanting to walk to the local Walmart at night, just for something to do, since there were so few options for kids to freely hang out outside of school hours.
This experience was in the back of his mind when he was researching for his Bachelor of Architecture thesis project at Kennesaw State University.
He came across the phrase “third place,” a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place.” Oldenburg described it as a variety of public places that host regular gatherings of people outside of work and home.
Jones recognized something that reemerges every few years in social media chatter and news articles — people of all ages are searching for those third places as a way to build community and relationships, from the youngest generations in society to the retired and elderly.
Metro Atlanta does offer third places, both commercial and public areas where people form connections and interact with a range of neighbors, but a lack of dedicated and accessible places for all age groups means there are still plenty of gaps.
What does it take to create a third place?
Jones found that teenagers are often left out of existing third places for reasons like a lack of transportation, prohibitive financial costs and environments that aren’t welcoming toward young people.
“(Teens) gather in places that were never meant for them and do not support their growth, creativity or emotional needs,” Jones wrote in his thesis. “They spend time in these leftover spaces because no place is designed for them to truly belong.”
He said his project is in part a reaction to the Atlanta Teen Takeovers, or recent spontaneous gatherings of teens in designated public places, sometimes leading to disruptive behavior.
So for his final project, Jones designed an environment that could become a third place for teenagers in Clayton County by transforming an abandoned strip mall into a vocational high school.
It could also be repurposed as a third place for kids and community members in the evenings and on the weekends.
“Let me make a space that would be somewhere where a parent would be comfortable leaving their kid, or their kid even coming home a little later from this space, because they know exactly where it is,” Jones said. “It has to be somewhere that is already considered a social area.”
Although the strip mall he chose in Clayton County is characterized by abandonment, Jones wrote in his thesis project, “Skill Yard,” that it’s within walking distance of several neighborhoods, has natural green space and mature trees around it and is surrounded by stores and services where caregivers may already be heading.
The resulting design is a space that would always be in use and offers teens multiple sections to move throughout, like a computer lab, a wood shop studio or a culinary classroom. An arena-style design encourages new interactions while still providing teens a safe area to retreat to.
Credit: Courtesy of Shannon Jones, graduate of the Bachelor of Architecture program at Kennesaw State University.
Credit: Courtesy of Shannon Jones, graduate of the Bachelor of Architecture program at Kennesaw State University.
Metro Atlanta’s car dependency is one factor that some believe prevents third places from flourishing, especially in the suburbs.
Darin Givens, an Atlanta urbanist and co-founder of advocacy group ThreadATL, is supportive of accessible urban environments that encourage interaction and community.
As someone who doesn’t drive, he understands the importance of accessible third places located within a neighborhood. He grew up in Cobb County, a less-than-walkable suburban Atlanta area, and has since lived in some of the most walkable parts of Atlanta, like downtown and the Old Fourth Ward.
It’s the urban planning concept of a 15-minute city, where you can walk to essential things within 15 minutes from where you live, that has made him feel connected and part of a community.
“That’s something that would be really great for us to move toward with our urbanism in Atlanta, and it’s something that we really lacked because of the incredible sprawl of Atlanta,” he said.
Creating more 15-minute cities in the suburbs could mean adjusting zoning laws to allow for more “urban infill,” he said, where coffee shops, stores and public parks are integrated within a neighborhood. In the short term, that might be limited to just adding more recreational trails that connect different parts of a town.
“There’s just this rush sometimes of seeing a familiar face in a third place like that, and just saying, ‘Hi,’ and having that little bit of a connection,” he said. “There’s a little bit of joy that goes along with that, that can go a long way for a person.”
How important is place to building community?
When Houston-based data communicator Evan O’Neil started noticing the decline of third places in his own city after the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to track the data.
He created the Third Place Index, a project that measures access to third places in communities across the U.S. It scores every U.S. Census tract based on its access to a list of common third places, like cafes, parks and community centers.
The higher the score, the more spaces a neighborhood has to “connect and build community,” he said. By linking it to the U.S. Census, he was able to pull in data surrounding the demographics and even civic engagement of an area to see what correlations he might find. People around the U.S. can type in their address to see how their own neighborhood ranks on the Index.
In Atlanta, rankings differ vastly between tracts. The census tract that includes Ponce City Market has more third place access than 96% of other census tracts in the nation, according to the Index. Meanwhile, the tract that includes Gresham Park in southeast Atlanta has more third place access than only 13% of other tracts.
The Third Place Index acknowledges a number of limitations in the data. For example, there’s no way of measuring how successful a location is as a third place for a community, or what the quality of it is, like a Starbucks may not be as impactful as a local coffee shop.
So far, the project is being used by several university researchers for broader projects, O’Neil said. But after spending about a year creating the map, he said the results he found are a little more complicated than he expected. The biggest conclusion he came to was, “honestly, confusion,” he said on the phone.
During the process, he made a second data set that compared his social infrastructure access data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data on loneliness prevalence. It offered a much more nuanced look than he expected, and the results depended on whether it was measuring an urban or a rural area.
In urban areas specifically, he said he did notice a connection between more access to third places and lower reports of loneliness.
“Tracts with moderate loneliness actually have more third places than the least lonely neighborhoods. But at the extremes, the pattern is stark: the loneliest fifth of census tracts have markedly fewer third places than everywhere else,” O’Neil wrote in an analysis article.
“The responsible takeaway isn’t a single policy prescription, rather it is the need to ask more questions,” he concluded.
“Place is important,” O’Neil told the AJC. “But it’s one of many factors.”
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
So, where are metro Atlanta’s third places?
In Southwest Atlanta, a local youth recreation center and a nonprofit are offering something similar to what Jones imagined in his thesis.
Darrell Jay Johnson grew up in the Peoplestown neighborhood. When he was a kid, he remembers his third places as being the Underground Atlanta development in downtown and its retail shops, like a magic store and thrift shops. He also frequently went to the Rick McDevitt Youth Center in his neighborhood.
When he moved back to Peoplestown after time in the U.S. military, he was disappointed to see that some of those places had disappeared or changed fundamentally, so he and co-founder Czyz “CJ” Jones decided to start their own organization to supplement what was left.
Dream Builders works with local kids and teenagers to help motivate them to “strive for excellence,” according to the website. What that means in practice is to “give them what you wanted as a kid,” Johnson said.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Dream Builders works out of the Rick McDevitt Youth Center and offers kids and teens various spaces to explore their interests and learn new skills, including a computer lab, a music studio and a maker space where they can screen print T-shirts. During the summer, Dream Builders also runs a paid internship that offers teens job training.
“That idea of the kids just having a place to just go and freely (converse), you know, kind of fellowship in a way where it’s almost, it’s supervised, but it’s almost unsupervised,” Johnson said.
Depending on the season, anywhere from 20-40 kids at a time can be found at Dream Builders.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Residents have been working to get funding to grow the youth center and the Four Corners Park over the next few years; some funding from Park Pride has already been secured.
Jaylan Smith, a rising junior at Georgia State University, discovered an interest in graphic design through Dream Builders and the youth center.
The most successful third places, in Smith’s opinion, are the ones that allow people to be themselves and feel comfortable.
“I think that shows that there’s a village that builds people up, where you can get your wisdom from the wise, and you can also get the ideas and the work ethic from the youth,” he said. “Together, that just makes a functioning machine that can produce tangible outcomes.”
Third places for adults can be easier to find around Atlanta. There are breweries, bookstores, coffee shops and craft clubs that offer retreats and community.
Portrait Coffee in Atlanta’s West End frequently hosts food and beverage events, car shows, game nights, concerts and a recurring photo walk with a historian from Archive Atlanta. Many of the events are free to attend.
“Part of what we’re trying to do at Portrait is make these events and the space as accessible as possible,” co-owner Aaron Fender said.
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
Credit: Abbey Cutrer/AJC
It’s all about intention, he said, from adding enough outlets in the cafe to making sure parents have high chairs to use for their kids.
“I think it’s in large part like observing and asking your community what they need and then choosing whether you want to respond to that or not,” Fender said. “When people see themselves in something, they want to be a part of it.”
While he’s seen more third places open around Southwest Atlanta, he said he believes residents need to be intentional about the spaces they want to build and be a part of.
“Being part of a community requires commitment from both sides,” he said.
Deborah D’Cruze, an Avondale Estates resident, made a concerted effort about a year ago to find an in-person third place to join, and it led her to her library’s nonfiction book club.
She found herself excited about the prospect of joining a multigenerational group, since she knew it would bring a variety of new perspectives to the books they read together.
“You have to be kind of open,” D’Cruze said. “It’s not supposed to be my age group, you know, it’s supposed to be everybody is welcome, everybody should be there.”
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