An ideal third place is somewhere with mutually accepted and agreed upon rules. You are free to come and go, but while there, you have some sort of shared prerogative. Whether that is respecting people’s social distancing preferences, not berating others for how they use the space, or understanding that an area is only for children and carers during certain hours. This is how you build out the kind of spaces where friends can actually bond with each other without stress or major expense. The cycle of people feeling uncomfortable about entering those spaces or existing in them fully also needs to be broken and the space should be turned into one where people can form meaningful connections based on mutual interests, explains Brendan Burchell, professor of social sciences at Cambridge University. “In different cultures, there are places with outdoor chess boards, for example, where you can just go and play chess,” he says. “But in the U.K., I think lots of our spaces don’t have that meaning. If you go to those spaces as a single, possibly lonely person, it might make you more lonely rather than less lonely.”
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