Don Martin

It was intended to be a main street.

It was intended to be a marketplace.

It was intended to be a whole bunch of stores inside of the building, which it is.

There are some interesting updates to that where we have seen some malls that are at risk of dying off because they've been dying for a while now become mixed-use spaces, but they're becoming mixed-use residential spaces where some of the unused spaces

The shops are being turned into apartments, and that's an interesting kind of way to reclaim those spaces.

But we are also seeing other people find unique ways to create third places and also reframe our understanding of what a third place is at all.

A lot of people who live in big cities, they think that they have access to a lot more third places simply because they have a lot more amenities around them, a lot more stuff to do around them.

But stuff to do is also not necessarily a third place.

There's some really interesting information that came out of the American Community Life Survey telling us that people who live in urban areas, yeah, they have more stuff around them.

But when they go hang out at that stuff, the people who live in more urban areas, more densely populated areas, aren't talking to people in those coffee shops or restaurants or bars or whatever.

They're going and hanging out either with themselves or with their friends.

So they're not meeting new people.

They're still...

partitioning themselves off from strangers.

Whereas people in more exurban or rural areas might have fewer amenities, but they are much more likely to talk to strangers.

When it comes to malls, when it comes to third places, when it comes to all of those conversations, it's a big messy conversation about which version of capitalism do you apply, which version of nostalgia to, and was any of it ever actually a third place?

Especially because we've been kicking kids out of them for the last 20 years or so.

All of the different ones that I've seen that have been converted into these residential mixed use spaces, I'm just like, man, especially here in the Chicago area, I'm just imagining waking up and it's a blizzard outside, but I don't have to go anywhere because I could just go downstairs to eat or go downstairs to the bookstore or go downstairs to the movie theater and just spend my whole day inside.

There's a lot of positives to it.

And also it gives people accessible housing in much more densely populated areas that they might not otherwise have been able to afford.