"A third place is a space that hybridizes multiple activities,” explains Yolaine Proult. “So we don't define it so much by an activity, but also not just by its activities, because it's more of a process. These are places that emerge in response to the needs of a territory. And that's why we have so much diversity in the ecosystem.”
A third place is what we put into it and it evolves constantly, but it always emerges from a citizen project, from people, from collectives that come together to seek and create solutions for mobility, food, culture, and coworking. This is one of the reasons why we find many of them outside metropolitan areas, where there are fewer services and thus less access to them.
The term "third place" was coined in the late 1980s in the United States, as Yolaine Proult explains, by a sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, who introduced the concept of third place, because it is neither the first place, home, nor the second place, work, the office. So between the two, we have the third place, which he qualifies as a space of conviviality, sociability, where people enjoy gathering and doing things together. It is through the encounters of the different people who frequent it that desires and projects are born.
France Tiers-Lieux is a public interest group, focused on a policy launched to support the deployment of these projects and thus services in areas where they are scarce.
“So the State has decided to encourage and support these places in their development. And our role is to co-construct public policy. We are a bit of a bridge between institutions on one side and grassroots actors on the other, and we also try to educate the State and institutions about what third places are, what they produce, and the innovation and experimentation they enable in the territories.”
Moreover, France Tiers-Lieux supports project leaders in developing their models through animation actions, national meetings among its actors, learning communities, and resource tools to consolidate and strengthen these models, which are sometimes still fragile.
In 2018, there were 1,800 third places in France. By 2023, there were 3,500, and today we count nearly 4,000. “These creations respond to a strong need to recreate connections, spaces where we meet, see each other, and do things together. At the same time, it is a response to a new flexibility, the ability to live a bit outside major urban centers. And we see that we are forced to reinvent our models on very strong societal issues. These places are truly committed to these questions of mobility, ecological transition, and sustainable food.”
"They are also citizens who say, perhaps in response to the political inability to address this at the local level, we will come together and carry out very pragmatic solutions that can, on a small scale, change things,” concludes Yolaine Proult.
