Oldenburg calls one’s “first place” the home and those that one lives with. The “second place” is the workplace—where people may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are “anchors” of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction.[1] In other words, “your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances.”[2]
Other scholars have summarized Oldenburg’s view of a third place with eight characteristics:[1][3]
Neutral ground
Occupants of third places have little to no obligation to be there. They are not tied down to the area financially, politically, legally, or otherwise and are free to come and go as they please.
Leveler (a leveling place)
Third places put no importance on an individual’s status in a society. Someone’s economic or social status does not matter in a third place, allowing for a sense of commonality among its occupants. There are no prerequisites or requirements that would prevent acceptance or participation in the third place.
Conversation is the main activity
Playful and happy conversation is the main focus of activity in third places, although it is not required to be the only activity. The tone of conversation is usually light-hearted and humorous; wit and good-natured playfulness are highly valued.
Accessibility and accommodation
Third places must be open and readily accessible to those who occupy them. They must also be accommodating, meaning they provide for the wants of their inhabitants, and all occupants feel their needs have been fulfilled.
The regulars
Third places harbor a number of regulars that help give the space its tone, and help set the mood and characteristics of the area. Regulars to third places also attract newcomers, and are there to help someone new to the space feel welcome and accommodated.
A low profile
Third places are characteristically wholesome. The inside of a third place is without extravagance or grandiosity, and has a homely feel. Third places are never snobby or pretentious, and are accepting of all types of individuals, from various different walks of life.
The mood is playful
The tone of conversation in third places is never marked with tension or hostility. Instead, third places have a playful nature, where witty conversation and frivolous banter are not only common, but highly valued.
A home away from home
Occupants of third places will often have the same feelings of warmth, possession, and belonging as they would in their own homes. They feel a piece of themselves is rooted in the space, and gain spiritual regeneration by spending time there.
The Public Parkour Park Roadmap is a free guide and series of articles to support individuals and communities in their efforts to build inter-generational play-spaces and parkour parks in their neighborhoods.
Over the last 20 years parkour, movnat, and other forms of alternative play-based movement practices have dramatically risen in interest and participation, drawing in not only children, but teens, adults, and seniors. However, in that same time there hasn’t been a notable increase in public play spaces for these older populations.
Parkour Parks, natural playscapes, and alternative play spaces can add immense value to a community — especially when designed to ensure inter-generational all-ability participation. Providing free access to spaces and tools that support physical and mental well being supports the growth of a whole and healthy society.
This guide is here to serve as a jumping off point, providing insight into the various stages of grassroots park development–starting with advocacy within your town or city through design, build, and long term community-care.
Overview of the Roadmap
As articles are released, I will update the links here.
Stage 1: Community Building & Partnership
You establish and develop the local and regional community through public or private programming. You build strategic partnerships with government agencies, community organizations, and companies, connecting them to your vision and the value of this type of project.
Stage 2: Public Advocacy, Education, and Normalization
You raise public awareness of the value of parkour, play, and alternative athletics in your community through civic participation, public speaking, and participation in larger community-building activities.
Organizations that provide funding for Public Space projects
Stage 4: Design & Construction
You hire an architecture, engineering, or design consulting firm to collaborate with your community leaders to create a vision. You work with your partners, site owners, and contractors to build.
Precedence – And why you need it
Essential Parkour Park Characteristics
Essential Playground Characteristics
Choosing Materials
Is it a Park or a Playground or a Public Space?
Why You Should Hire A Professional
Choosing a Design Professional
Considering Accessibility
Stage 5: Long Term Community Caretaking
You commit to and create ways to ensure the long term use and health of the park. A park that is well used and loved will continue to receive caretaking and maintenance.
Why Multi-Community Investment is Critical to Success
Connecting the Community to your Park
Activating the Park through Programming Partners
Sustaining Community Involvement
Leave No Trace Together
Organizing Community Events 101
Project Footnotes
Schedule This project went live February 2020 and is on track for 1 article a month.
Geographic Bias This guide is written from a North American perspective on risks, funding, and community behaviors. However many of these articles will be useful for understanding project processes regardless of location.
Attribution This guide was inspired by the public skateboard park development guide, which I highly recommend since skateboarders and parkour practitioners face similar issues.
Living Project This is a living project that will be modified, updated, and expanded when appropriate.
Use Professionals This is an experiential guide, not a prescriptive set of rules. Always consult with legal and design professionals familiar with your local code, permitting, site, and funding requirements and restrictions. Every town, city, state, and country is different.
About Me
I am a non-profit director, partnership manager, and designer with 10 years experience leading strategic planning for community organizations, consulting on parkour design-built projects, managing major cross-sector partnerships, and facilitating professional development in the parkour community. I have traveled extensively and studied public spaces and playgrounds across the world, oversaw 50+ temporary playground art installations, and continue providing smaller communities with individualized support advocating for the creation and preservation of parkour environments.
I also hold a professional degree in Architecture from Syracuse University
“Playground experiences can mold a lifetime.” – Jon Ronson
I recently got to read the book Playground by James Mollison, which is a photography project to capture the diversity of play experiences children had in different countries. He described his motivation for the project at the very end: “When I conceived this series of pictures, I was thinking about my time at school. I realized that most of my memories were from the playground. It had been a space of excitement, games, bullying, laughing, tears, teasing, fun, and fear.”
When we engage in play, we suspend reality and can give ourselves space to try on new identities, explore repressed emotions, and self-express in new ways that might otherwise feel risk in ‘normal’ life. It can be as innocent as dressing up in ways that in ‘normal’ life would leave us with a fear of social rejection or on a darker note role playing the villians in our bedtime stories. Our playgrounds are not only places of joy and creativity but also laboratories for experiments with anger, violence, aggression, and our ‘shadow’ selves.
Jon Ronson wrote that “Playgrounds can mold a lifetime”. As I look at all these photos, I can’t help but think that while we absolutely should be thinking about how we shape our play spaces physically perhaps we should be spending more time on how to shape them politically. Who makes the rules and who referees? How far are we allowed to go in our self-experiments one way or another? How do we handle conflict, address violence, and support communication?
As adults, teachers, designers, leaders–we sometimes think we know best. We forge ahead laying out rules, regulations, expectations, we facilitate and supervise, we start to box in play and public activity according to what we think is the most safe. We consult books, best practices, and professionals…. and often forget to ask the one group that matters most–our users. When things go even a little bit array, we jump in to fix, and the opportunity to have a direct experience cultivating skills in negotiation, temperance, independence and personal responsibility is greatly diminished.
What I’m getting at is: when we alienate the users of our playspaces (whether children or adults) from the creation of the rules that govern it and the decisions that physically shape it, we lose the opportunity to come together as a whole community. We loose a chance to have a group dialogue about how we want to live together. To understand collectively our standards for integrity in our interactions. We perpetuate power structures, stereotypes, and personal fears.
I don’t have a strong concluding point except to say that we should, whenever possible, engage in collaborative playcemaking. Engage all stakeholders. Seek out the smallest voices, those disenfranchised and unheard or undervalued. Our playgrounds can be more than just recreation sites… they can be places of deep healing too.
I think we all agree when it comes to the importance of play and movement, especially for children. However, it frequently seems that children are the only ones allowed to indulge, and that as a society we not only have forgotten its value to teens, adults, and seniors but resist it. We verbally dismiss and label it as unproductive, self-indulgent, and immature, tell others to ‘quit playing around and get back to work, to ‘grow up’, and communicate a story that play is inappropriate.
Yet for those of us who dare to play, we are rewarded with some incredible benefits. Beyond the obvious increase in physical fitness & health, you also will find that stress levels drop, our learning and memory is more complete, social interactions become easier, and our ability grows to see opportunities in places we would otherwise have overlooked.
Play contributes deeply to our development as individuals, regardless of what age.
While we could deeply examine ways our resistance to play manifest in societal behaviors, I’d like to just scrape the surface of the story being told by the built world.
The city seems to be devoted to designing, building, and renovating places to play… for children. Inevery city there are hundreds of playgrounds and public spaces, but how many are open to adult and teen play?
In Central Park alone there are 21 designated playgrounds. Of those 21, a grand total of 0 are designed for teenagers or adults, and most go a step further to display signage barring use. (There is ‘fitness equipment’ available for use, but we’ll get into that in a second.)
Teens and adults could try to creatively re-purpose these youth playgrounds for their own purpose and play, but at their own risk–social and civil. Considered a nuisance to parents-they’ll be met with dirty looks and an of concerns for the safety of the children. Considered a danger by the city, they will be ushered out by rangers and possibly even ticketed. Signs are posted, fences are built. Boundaries pop up around play.
The built world is literally telling us that play is not for the rest of us.
Of course, we are living today in what could be considered the renaissance of Play. And the City has taken notice of the importance of getting up and out on your feet (2). There are a growing number of campaigns, programs, and facilities to assist adults in cultivating an active, healthy lifestyle.
However, a gym is not the same thing as a public playground, and does not offer the same set of complex benefits. Those four walls keep a lot of people and experiences out of the equation, and unable to participate.
Outdoor Gym ≠ Playground
In 2012 NYC opened its first official ‘adult playground’ and has plans to build two dozen more by the end of 2014 (3). This is a great start.
However, calling these spaces playgrounds is a gross exaggeration. Playgrounds are spaces that require creativity and imagination, storytelling and social negotiation, problem solving and exploration – and these ‘adult playgrounds’ lack all of that… because they are just outdoor gyms. Gyms come complete with rules and regulations, signs and directions, notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, expectations around achievement and behaviors. There is little creative thinking required and social interaction is avoidable.
While there is the benefit of improving economic access to a socially permissive space for physical activity (and that it smells significantly better than a box gym), so much is still lost and missing. Not to mention that the story being told about movement for adults is one of prescription and conformity.
(I will note that there has been some effort made to provide spaces for teens, but mostly in the realm of skateboarding-contingent upon the signature of a waiver and specific equipment requirements. There also was a recent project to build a playground for teens in Hudson Yards, but no others that I could find slated for construction. )
All spaces considered, there is no deny the unacceptable and near complete lack of opportunity for teenagers and adults to engage in free, unstructured, social, creative movement play.
What Next?
Now, I know here many will say that NYC has so much open park space. But in reality, in a Park your options are to walk on this path or that one, or to sit on a bench, in the shade or the sun, or to buy a vendor hot dog & people watch. There are tons of bike paths if you’re able to afford a bike, or you could throw a ball in the field, if you’re allowed on the grass, and only as long as you don’t disturb your neighbors. Any deviation from ‘normWhat next?al’ behavior will still be met with the social kickback we talked about above.
We need physical spaces complete with policy and permissions that permit play.
Thus with the lack of options it should be no surprise to hear that in NYC more than 1/2 the adult population is either overweight or obese(4)(5), especially when compounded with the fact that many of the opportunities that are available to get moving are too expensive, difficult, competitive, or, to put it plainly, not a whole lot of fun.
A sustainable, healthy lifestyle needs to be more than gym workouts, expensive specialty classes, and competitive team sports. We don’t need more gyms and classes in our city; we need more playful infrastructure and community spaces to support play across all ages. We need spaces that are complex, inter-generational, and flexible, that allow adults & teenagers to develop and explore their own open-ended challenges. Colorful. Social. Open to chaos, exploration, creation. A place that is safe, welcoming, accessible, and fun.
We need to stop looking at play as a distraction or diversion from reality, but rather as an integral element of our continual, healthful development. We need to design the places we live to support living a life in play.
