Third places are making a comeback, with less emphasis on ‘place’ | Canada Voices

Picture this: You’re at Calgary’s Civic Tavern on a warm June evening in 2025. An enthusiastic, sold-out crowd has gathered, drinks in hand, to listen to a lecture titled “Terrorism: History and Trends”.

Not what you were expecting?

This may not sound like a typical night out in Cowtown, but it was exactly what a number of Calgarians were looking for. The talk – the first of a now immensely popular series, Boozy Lectures – was by Leyde Rodriguez Guervos, a political science Master’s graduate from the University of Calgary. Tickets ran out in minutes, with a waitlist of 100 people.

The success of their first event proved what co-founders Artem Stadnichenko and Chloe Villamor already suspected: people in their city were hungry for spaces where they could connect with one another outside of work.

“[Coming out of the pandemic,] a lot of people, especially young downtown professionals, lost the easy ‘third places’ where they’d bump into people. Add screen fatigue and misinformation, and there’s a real hunger for something in-person and substantive,” Stadnichenko says.

Importantly, Boozy Lectures events remain either free or low-cost to ensure anyone who wants to attend can – until they’re at capacity, that is.

“We founded this project on the idea that everyone should have access to education and community,” Stadnichenko says. “One of the reoccurring barriers we identified is accessibility, especially the cost [because] most academic subjects [are] behind a paywall.”

In the late 1980s, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe gathering spaces where people socialize and connect with one another. Unlike the first place (home) and the second place (work), third places are public, informal, inclusive and devoted to interpersonal connection.

And they’re currently experiencing a resurgence. According to a 2024 survey by YMCA Canada and the YMCA of Greater Toronto, most Canadians have at least one third place, and even those who don’t have one see their importance, with 89 per cent of respondents saying they boost well-being and 85 per cent saying they improve quality of life.

Compare that to a similar study by the Environics Institute in 2022, which reported a stark decline of at least eight percentage points in group participation between 2018 and 2022 across recreational sports, cultural, education and hobby organizations, and even unions and professional associations.

“COVID likely served to raise peoples’ awareness of the importance of third places,” says Debbie Laliberte Rudman, a professor in the School of Occupational Therapy at Western University in London, Ont., studying third places. She believes that our collective disconnection from third places during the pandemic is what made us realize how important they are.

“Oldenburg pointed to third places as often taken-for-granted aspects of our lives, and as under-researched despite their significance. Post-COVID, there has been greater research and policy attention to the impacts of social disconnection and loneliness,” she says.

Today’s third places don’t always look like Oldenburg’s original examples. He was looking at cafes, bars, hair salons – all permanent physical spaces. While some scholars still subscribe to that concept, others have expanded the definition to include social spaces that aren’t tied to one specific physical place – such as, say, a roaming lecture series or run club.

Similarly, affordability wasn’t a key area of focus for Oldenburg, but it is an important characteristic of third places today. Laliberte Rudman points out that access to free public spaces isn’t always guaranteed; for example, cities often bar people from hanging out in parks after a certain time or remove benches to make it harder to linger. At the same time, the ever-rising cost of living can make it difficult to frequent third places that require a purchase with entry, such as cafes or restaurants.

“Financial accessibility can become a key determinant of whether someone can regularly be part of a third place within their community,” Laliberte Rudman says.

When Toronto-based youth non-profit the Kickback Foundation decided to start a free run club for racialized youth and their families, accessibility of all types was at the forefront, says the organization’s founder, Jamal Burger. It was important to him and his co-founder Mac Madrigal, who first came up with the idea for a Kickback run club, that their program welcomed people of all ages, backgrounds and fitness levels.

That inclusivity is a key part of their success; what started as five people running on a Tuesday evening is now a 200-person community that spends their Saturdays running one of three routes of varying lengths and difficulty levels. Almost all of them are immigrants. Many didn’t see themselves as runners before joining this club.

“People come to Kickback to find their sense of community,” he says. “You’ll see a grandma running with her granddaughter, parents running with their kids in a stroller, friends who are running for the first time – because it feels safe.”

To keep running accessible, Kickback has partnered with Asics to provide any youth that completes three runs with a free pair of shoes once a year. Anyone over the age of 29 gets a 50-per-cent off coupon.

For Burger, the goal is for the impacts of the run club to go well beyond the space they’re creating. “We want Kickback Run Club to be a gateway to activity in their own lives,” he says.

To Laliberte Rudman, the question of whether something officially is or isn’t a third place is not as important as whether it intentionally encourages inclusivity, accessibility and affordability in public life.

“Having public spaces where people can gather, connect and build a sense of belonging are essential to individual and societal well-being,” she says.