This week our Director Melissa Neighbour had the chance to jump on ABC Radio to chat to Rae Johnston about one of our favourite planning topics: third spaces.
Now, "third spaces" is a pretty technical urban nerd term — which all of us here at Sky Planning certainly are 🤓 — but we think there's a much easier way to think about them.
We call them the loungerooms of society.
They're the places outside our homes and workplaces where life happens and you just hang. The local park where you bump into neighbours while walking the dog. The harbour pool where people gather on a summer evening. The plaza where children run around while their parents chat nearby. The library, the community garden, the public square, the shady bench under a tree.
They're the places where we simply get to exist alongside one another.
And I think they're becoming increasingly important.
A crisis we're not talking about enough
We're having a lot of conversations at the moment about the housing crisis, and rightly so. But alongside it sits another challenge that I don't think we talk about nearly enough: loneliness.
More and more Australians are reporting that they have little or no regular contact with people outside their own household. At the same time, the cost of living keeps climbing and social connection increasingly comes with a price tag. Catching up with friends often means buying lunch, grabbing drinks or paying for an activity somewhere.
But connection shouldn't depend on your bank balance.
Everyone deserves access to beautiful places where they can spend time, connect with others and feel part of a community, regardless of whether they spend a dollar.
That's why we don't see third spaces as a nice extra if budgets allow. We classify them as essential social infrastructure.
Small intervention, lasting change
The interesting thing is that the best third spaces are not always the grand or expensive ones.
One of our favourite examples is right here in our local area of Canada Bay. A couple of quiet streets that weren't really doing much for anyone were trialled as shared public spaces using some simple tactical urbanism measures — planters, furniture and a bit of imagination. The community loved them and today they've become genuine gathering places.
The best part is the element of play. There's a table tennis table right in the heart of the space. People go there armed with coffees and paddles to play against neighbours and whoever else decides to join in. It's a tiny intervention in the scheme of a city, but it has completely changed how people use and experience that space.
That, to me, is the magic of good placemaking.
Cities are built from relationships
As planners, we spend a lot of time talking about housing numbers, traffic volumes, floor space ratios and infrastructure delivery. Those things matter enormously.
But increasingly we think we should also be asking different questions.
How many conversations happened here today?
How many children played here?
How many neighbours met for the first time?
How many people left feeling just a little more connected than when they arrived?
Because ultimately, great cities aren't built from concrete. They're built from relationships.
And third spaces — or as we prefer to call them, the loungerooms of society — are where many of those relationships begin.