Following circulation of the original third spaces paper, government announced a policy focus on creating a third space for youth, formalized in a Cabinet decision in November 2024. A youth hub venue subsequently launched, demonstrating that advocacy grounded in clear analysis can move policy from concept to implementation. This article builds on that work, expanding the framework to address third spaces across all demographics and scales.
The third spaces framework
City environments and community infrastructure have a real impact on the well-being, quality of life, and mental wellness of their inhabitants – similar to more "material" policies. To meet the potential of third space programs, these third spaces cannot be just established and then left alone – there will be need for a period of active campaigns, drives, incentives, events, and management to reach a tipping point where they become fully established in each community. Malé City has many great projects and programs that started well but end up fading away as the momentum faded. Learning from the past makes clear that an extended hand-holding stage is crucial.
What third spaces are
The importance of third spaces or third places – public spaces aside from just home and work/school where people feel welcome to spend their time and can interact with the wider community outside of just family and colleagues – has become increasingly accepted internationally in urban planning, sociology, and community development fields as a crucial element in fostering social cohesion and community well-being. The concept was first described by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989, and the importance of these spaces has been increasingly recognized as the urban planning and design fields moved away from vehicle-centred mass construction, toward understanding the value of elements such as a focus on walkability and 15-minute cities, integration of natural elements and greenery, harmonious design approaches, cooling designs to avoid urban heat island formation, sustainable environmental practices, and ease of public transport use.
Although this defined concept is relatively new, institutions that met many of the characteristics of third spaces play important roles throughout human history. In ancient Greece, agoras were public squares where people exchanged ideas and discussed political issues. Traditional teahouses in Imperial China provided spaces for business meetings and social interactions across different strata of society. Coffeehouses of the 17th century became known as "penny universities" because people frequented them for intellectual discourse and enlightening conversations on a range of issues. In Victorian Europe, "saloons" at the houses of intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, and wealthy patrons facilitated the rapid dissemination of scientific, philosophical, and literary ideas, which itself led to key innovations and advancements among those exposed to new ideas by attending. Similarly, mingling in saloons led to the Lost Generation novelists who produced some of the most famous literature ever written. Even in the present, most cities that are considered vibrant and exciting to live in are ones with what we would consider a rich range of third spaces: cities where you could spend days passing time in public libraries and malls, and find art events or music shows or book launches or some other thing to do on any given day or night.
In his original description of third spaces, Oldenburg introduced several key attributes. They are neutral grounds, accessible to all members of a community regardless of social status or background, free for people to come and go as they please. They serve as levellers, environments where people meet without much knowledge about their work, background, or status and where different backgrounds and classes are in a setting to interact on equal terms. The core of the third space is opportunities for organic interaction and conversations, even though third spaces also need to appeal to a wide cross-section of society and be a conducive space for all sorts of activities and ways to spend time. The atmosphere should mostly be light-hearted and focused more on being around members of the community, rather than having a focus on "productivity" – book clubs, film clubs, all-age cooking or art classes, creative writing workshops, art exhibits, music shows, guest lectures, or quiz trivia events fit the theme, while activities such as business entrepreneurship guidance would fit more within the already existing network of BCC spaces such as the SME Hub, Seed, or other innovation hubs. Third spaces should be open, easy to access, and accommodating to people from all walks of life, including having accessibility for people with disabilities or the elderly. Being easy to go to and from these spaces would be a benefit, such as having them close to public transport hubs. They generally have a lower profile, with a feel that is more relaxed and harmonious rather than very formal or extravagant. Oldenburg also notes the value of these spaces having regulars, who set the tone and act as an anchor that welcomes and guides new or infrequent visitors into community connections and activities.
Not every third space will meet all of these characteristics. A thriving city will have a wide range of third spaces, with different sizes and different degrees of supervision and different levels of service, at different costs for establishment and upkeep. Along with having larger third spaces with free-of-cost entry designed to meet all of these needs for the whole city, such as public libraries or community centres, there is also value in having a web of smaller and lower-maintenance third spaces and venues closer to individual neighbourhoods and local communities, ensuring that there is somewhere to spend time within walking distance for everyone. Examples of third spaces vary widely depending on the cultural and social context – cafes, libraries, workout or sports spaces, community centres, malls, food courts, public carnivals or festivals, playground areas, bookstores, parks, and cinemas. In an ideal form, all of these can serve on some level as hubs of informal public life. Libraries are a particularly crucial part of the makeup of a healthy and thriving city that serves all of its residents.
In practice, an ideal approach – and what we recommend across this work – is a mix of approaches. This includes private establishments like cafes, food courts, malls, boulevards, cinemas, or even more niche "hangout spots" like bowling alleys, where the existing owners and management can partner up with government bodies and make small changes to encourage community use, as well as small public spaces or mini-venues that can be supported by local vendors or volunteers, medium-sized venues, public outdoor and indoor spaces, and public libraries or community centres.
The state's role here is not to decide which particular cafe or venue should succeed. It is to make room for third spaces and to support them with light, predictable rules. That can mean zoning that allows small shops and cafes at ground level in residential buildings, cheaper and simpler licensing for non-alcoholic venues that host events, small grants or tax relief for community cultural spaces and active programming of public libraries, halls and parks. Many of these steps cost little compared to large capital projects, but they have a substantial impact on whether people feel they have somewhere to go that is not home or work.
The need for third spaces in Malé
Having imported development models from foreign countries and just omitted those unsuitable to Maldivian society rather than developing culturally suitable alternative institutions which could replace their role in the community ecosystem is a factor. Establishing bars or pubs is of course not an option for the Maldives, but the overall role that those spaces play in community building of neighbourhoods in other countries – low-pressure environments where social interaction was normalized, activities like pub trivia nights were commonly held, and people within a neighbourhood across social and class dynamics and demographics were likely to interact consistently – that role has no equivalent institution here. The available options for many are cafes and shisha lounges.
These do not meet the requirements of an ideal third place either. The social norms in these places typically discourage interaction beyond one's immediate group, limiting their effectiveness as true third spaces. It is rare for people to interact with anyone outside their existing social groups. Cafes and lounges function more as places to spend time with people you already know, rather than a way to meet new people. They also require people to spend money just to have a suitable third space in the public sphere. These expenses can add up, especially for people with smaller incomes or paying high rents, but even if the costs were small it is still unsuitable on principle that people do not have an option for what should be a basic civic right that does not require them to spend money just to access it. These spaces are not as conducive to elderly people or families with children either, and do not create spaces suitable for intergenerational interactions and building of community ties. The prevalence of shisha lounges as one of the few relaxed social spaces does indirectly encourage increased use of nicotine, which is not ideal from a public health and policy perspective.
Cultural events and public gatherings, which could serve as transient third spaces, are infrequent by the standards of a vibrant and thriving capital city, and often limited to large-scale events. There is a gap in more and smaller events that could provide ongoing opportunities for interaction and engagement within and across communities. A general mindset toward public events is for larger-scale productions that need relatively big audience counts to be sustainable, whether to turn a profit on tickets or to justify the logistics, organizing, and staffing costs and time spent for events held by organizations. This gap in regular, smaller events is partly a lack of an established and encouraged arts policy to support a local scene with the capacity to sustain a constant event calendar, and partly due to the scarcity of smaller venues that can sustain smaller events or shows, meaning small productions need to be able to sell out a bigger venue to be sustainable.
The city's only cinema has limited offerings and no actual space outside the cinema halls where people can wait around the way people often do with cinemas abroad. There are regular art exhibits, but these are usually gallery-style events where talking to strangers would be frowned upon and quiet observation is encouraged, which makes them valuable as a source of enrichment and vibrancy within a city but does not make them a suitable third space for a community. There is a lack of more communal-style art events, such as fair-style exhibits or convention-style events with music, refreshments, and casual seating areas where people can browse at their leisure.
Public libraries serve as key institutions in providing community third spaces in cities across the world, offering safe and comfortable environments with books, research materials, and internet access that benefit students, those in poverty, and marginalized individuals. The National Library of Maldives is not an ideal third space in its current state. While it used to serve as such a space for the community back when it had its own premises and was open at nighttime – where families, children, students, youth, and employed adults could best make use of it – the National Library has been housed since 2012 in an office space that was originally intended as temporary, and has faced staffing and funding challenges leading it to close at 6pm and be unavailable in evenings when there would be the most demand and need for third spaces.
While there has been investment in sports complexes, these alone do not fulfil the role of a third space, where you are free to spend your own time doing any range of activity without needing to already be there as part of a specific activity. There are developed outdoor spaces and park areas, from the area around Rasfannu up to the central park and playground areas in Hiya Flats. While parks and outdoor spots serve a crucial role within communities, they still lack the elements needed to be a suitable third space, and face the same challenges as cafes in that there is not much scope for organic introductions and interactions among people. Indoor spaces are necessary regardless: they allow people to escape the heat but are also welcoming at any time and any situation, whether you need to be dressed to not sweat through, or need to work with a power outlet and Wi-Fi, or generally want cooler waiting spaces while your kids play.
Parents have limited suitable places to spend time with their children outside the home, particularly comfortable indoor spaces. Parents may be able to spend time with younger children in parks, but there are no longer spaces for parents with children at primary school age to do activities together or to have them do supervised activities with their peers unless they participate in a sports team. Surveys and focus groups revealed demand for community third spaces such as libraries. Youth desire a variety of services: reading areas, spaces for community engagement where people can talk and spend time as a third space instead of only quiet spaces, a vibrant place where youth actually want to spend time. Currently, even with a shortage of spaces for young people, they prefer to spend money for limited time in cafes due to unsuitability of current amenities that should ideally serve as community spaces.
Previously, the National Library was a place where families and children of all ages could spend time in the evenings, reading books and being away from screens. There are no such spaces now for families to spend time together at times suitable to them since the library closes early. A lack of spaces that can support intellectual and social enrichment for their children makes screen use the path of least resistance for exhausted and overworked parents. Younger generations have attention span problems, making it hard for them to listen to speeches beyond 10 minutes. Parents report that children do not read much and their communication is heavily influenced by TV. There is concern about excessive screen time among children, most of it on videos and games in English. Without suitable spaces outside the home, opportunities for activities that are not based around screens are limited.
Atomised individuals, fragmented communities
The atomisation of society as part of the modern condition has been widely discussed across countries, with trends in the Maldives showing no difference. Before the onset of globalization and widespread use of technology, island communities in the Maldives were characterized by strong interpersonal connections. Individuals knew not just their close friends, but also maintained relationships across various social circles and generations. This interconnected social structure provided a sense of community and belonging that extended beyond immediate family and close friendships. Modern Maldivian society has become increasingly atomized. Social interactions are often limited to smaller, more homogeneous groups, with fewer opportunities for cross-generational and cross-demographic mingling. This shift has led to a decline in the kind of broad, community-wide social networks that once defined island life.
This atomization is a contributing factor to isolation, loneliness, alienation, and disillusionment among people, and itself is downstream of a lack of true third spaces. One way to describe how people experience human connection is as a set of increasing social circles – the first circle being the closest friends and family you talk to often, the second being friends and colleagues you might not be as close to, the third being acquaintances, and circles beyond that being your wider network all the way up to members of the community you may not directly know but have seen around. In an atomized society, the circles that people actually engage with consistently shrink, often all the way down to just two or three or even just one close friend, sometimes even no close friends and most of your time outside of work being just you and a screen. Sometimes people drift, having loose outer circles of acquaintances but never having an opportunity to form closer ties and bring these people into your closer circles. In both cases, people experience a shrinking of their worlds, isolation, loneliness, and a disengagement with the wider community and society around them. A web of ties to the community at various levels are a grounding aspect for individuals, providing a psychological and emotional anchor, and providing more of a sense of purpose and responsibility toward the well-being of something bigger than yourself.
Third spaces are also youth policy and mental health policy. Young people who have nowhere to meet except cramped flats or street corners are more likely to withdraw, to get into conflict, or to feel that the city is not for them. Adults who have nowhere to see friends without spending heavily on food or tickets are more likely to feel isolated. A network of affordable, welcoming third spaces gives people a place to be seen and to see others. Youth and young families with children express feelings of isolation in modern society and desire third spaces beyond work and home, including libraries, art spaces, events, and readings. While youth face versions of the same general problems of atomisation and alienation, they also face specific pressures: high youth unemployment; a lack of privacy and space for the many youth still living with families as well as no spaces of their own to spend time with peers; a lack of "hangout spots" and places to spend time that either require consistently spending money or place them in proximity to crime in ways that create peer pressure and encourage participation; a lack of things to do or a sense of purpose that leads people to numb themselves and self-medicate through drugs.
Loneliness among the elderly is endemic: another example of how aspects of community that were common in smaller islands are lost as Malé City has grown into an urban metropolis. Uneven streets, traffic congestion, and narrow pavements uneven enough to be a walking hazard in spots are often a complete barrier for wheelchairs and scooters that could otherwise have become a means of mobility for the elderly to be outside safely. The dominant mode of transportation being motorcycles reinforces this, as frail older people or individuals with certain disabilities cannot go places on the back of a motorcycle. With car ownership being rare and regular taxi use being expensive, older people frequently end up confined to their homes. Focus groups suggested that free car pickup and drop-off from homes to a library or community space for elderly people could provide dignity, autonomy, and mobility, as well as community participation – many elderly people will not ask their family members for things out of politeness or embarrassment about seeming like a burden.
Malé, as the capital, houses many people from the islands who do not have existing ties within the community upon arrival and can experience isolation and loneliness. High rent and poor housing conditions mean homes are often not the most pleasant environments for many people to spend extended time in. There is a lack of common urbanist elements considered to be enriching and soothing for city inhabitants: looking out from a window to see concrete and buildings, crowds, traffic congestion, parked motorcycles clogging the streets, the conditions for urban heat islands, a lack of direct contact with nature, narrow streets and a lack of wide-open spaces. All of these factors combine to create an urgent need for third spaces people can access and spend time in without further depleting their limited financial resources.
The value of building around third spaces
Community ties and personal enrichment are important for individuals to feel whole and connected rather than atomised and isolated. Vibrant, close-knit communities that support individual enrichment result from policies to create public third spaces where individuals from a community can interact across different strata and demographics, doing different kinds of activities, while learning from and about each other. Educated and informed citizens are crucial to maintaining a healthy society. Information literacy and critical thinking skills immunise people from succumbing to disinformation and empower them to be more engaged in decisions that affect them. An environment where intellectual and literary pursuits are valued can be one where people feel a sense of purpose and fulfilment. A society based on learning-centred values can encourage productive collaboration and healthy competition while discouraging destructive competition, supporting collaborative development.
Third spaces provide individuals with opportunities to connect with others outside their immediate social circles. These connections can range from casual acquaintanceships to deeper friendships, all of which contribute to a sense of belonging within the community. As neutral grounds away from the pressures of home and work, third spaces offer people a place to relax and decompress, reducing stress and contributing to better mental health outcomes. Through diverse interactions and exposure to different perspectives, individuals experience personal growth and continuous learning. Changing environments and interacting with diverse groups of people can boost creativity and productivity, which is especially relevant for those who may feel constrained by their home or work environments.
Third spaces facilitate the formation of weak ties – casual acquaintanceships that have been shown to have significant positive impacts on community well-being. These connections strengthen the overall social fabric. By providing venues for regular, informal interactions, third spaces help build social capital within communities, encouraging increased trust, cooperation, familiarity, kinship, and mutual support among community members. In an increasingly atomised society, third spaces can play a crucial role in facilitating interactions across different age groups and demographics, bridging generational gaps and promoting mutual understanding. Social networks and community ties fostered by third spaces contribute to community resilience – in times of crisis or hardship, these networks can provide crucial support and resources.
By providing accessible spaces for social interaction, third spaces can significantly reduce social isolation, particularly for vulnerable groups such as the elderly, rural immigrants in urban areas, and low-income residents. Well-designed and maintained third spaces can contribute to crime reduction through increased community ties, mentorship opportunities, stronger social bonds, and directly by providing safe "hangout spots" where youth can spend time away from criminal elements and peer pressure. Third spaces can be part of an overall policy approach to reduce cultural standards and social norms that affect the mental state and well-being of individuals while also being toxic for society. Spaces that model community ties built on cooperation and mutual support can play a role in shifting norms away from destructively competitive mindsets towards a more collaborative culture.
A mixed approach: small, medium, and large
For third spaces to fully achieve their potential in enriching individuals, building community ties, repairing the social fabric, changing cultural norms and expectations, and bringing life and vibrancy and a sense of identity to cities, they have to be woven deeply into the physical and experiential environment of residents. This means several things.
There should be some third spaces present in close proximity to people in every community, developing community ties and neighbourhoods with a sense of collective ownership and responsibility toward each other and the area itself. There should be third spaces serving different purposes, contexts, and situations to ensure every kind of person in every situation and state of mind feels welcome – places to quietly be in the presence of a community as well as spaces to directly talk to people and make new friends, places to have fun with people you know and places to go out of your comfort zone in a reassuring environment, places for kids to play and their parents to talk and young families to get to know each other because "it takes a village." And there should be some bigger, centralized third spaces where not just different circles and different demographics can all be present but where people from communities across the city can interact across smaller communities and neighbourhoods into forming wider webs of connections and meeting people from different walks of life, where these bigger spaces can support a much wider set of options that can meet many needs in one place.
The National Library of Maldives, in its eventual redevelopment and new premises, can be reimagined and expanded to fulfil this role more effectively, involving design elements and facilities, choices in services, extending operating hours to accommodate evening use, and introducing new programs and services that encourage social interaction and community engagement.
Efforts should also be made to develop smaller third spaces at the neighbourhood level. These could take the form of community centres, small parks, or repurposed vacant spaces. By creating a network of smaller third spaces throughout urban areas, residents can have easy access to communal spaces within walking distance of their homes. This approach would be lower-cost and can be started up quickly with relatively small administrative overhead, and regardless of whether or not other centralized community spaces are developed, mini-spaces closer at neighbourhood levels are an important layer. These are what our venue network proposal addresses directly.
Piloting community cultural programming
The conventional approach to cultural events treats attendance as the primary measure of success. Events are planned for high-traffic days, promoted heavily, and considered failures if turnout is low. This creates a cultural landscape where only established artists with guaranteed audiences can justify holding events, where programming clusters around weekends and holidays, and where there is nothing to do on an ordinary weekday evening – cultural participation requires advance planning, checking what is on, blocking out the right evening, making sure enough friends are coming to make it worthwhile.
We wanted to test a different model: one where small attendance is the norm rather than a failure, where events happen frequently enough that people can drop by without planning, where any given night offers options even if some of those options are niche enough that only you and your friends and a couple of strangers show up. The goal is not to maximize attendance at individual events but to maximize the frequency and accessibility of events overall. A city where there is always something happening is fundamentally different from a city where things happen occasionally but draw big crowds when they do.
Testing the model
Public Policy Lab partnered with a local karaoke venue to hold a series of free community events open to the general public. We deliberately scheduled events on Sundays and Mondays – days when the venue was often unbooked, unlike the high-demand Thursday through Saturday nights. The venue provided the space, the screen, and the seating; we handled programming. This demonstrated something important: existing businesses can serve as cultural infrastructure during their off-peak hours with minimal additional investment. The venue was already there, already had the equipment, and was underutilized on slower nights. What was missing was simply the programming and the invitation to the public.
The pilot also included poetry reading events. All events were free and open to the public, with no registration required. Promotion was minimal – essentially word-of-mouth among people we knew. This was intentional: we were not trying to draw crowds. We were trying to see whether a low-key, low-promotion model could still bring people out.
Small turnout as proof of concept
Turnout was small. The most attended event had about 16 people. Some evenings had six or eight. For the model being tested, this is the relevant finding: people showed up. People showed up to a free event on a Sunday or Monday evening, with almost no promotion, to watch a film or listen to poetry with strangers. They did not need a big crowd to justify coming. They did not need it to be a special occasion. They just came because something was happening and it sounded interesting.
Eight people watching Spirited Away together on a Monday night is not a failure to fill seats – it is a nice Monday night. Six people at a poetry reading is not a flop – it is a poetry reading. The pressure to perform, to draw crowds, to justify the logistics through attendance numbers, evaporates when the baseline expectation is simply that something is happening and whoever wants to come can come.
This also creates space for content that would never survive under a big-audience model: niche interests, experimental work, amateur performers trying things out. When low attendance is normal rather than embarrassing, people can take risks.
Scaling from pilot to city-wide programming
The pilot confirmed three things. People will attend small, low-key cultural events if they are accessible and free – even without heavy promotion, even on off-peak days. Existing businesses can provide venue infrastructure during underutilized hours. And programming can be sustained with minimal logistics when the goal is frequency rather than spectacle.
The next step is to replicate this across multiple locations, build a consistent calendar where there is always something happening somewhere, and develop an online directory so that anyone wondering what to do tonight can find an answer. The goal is a city where cultural participation is routine rather than occasional, where you can decide at 7pm that you want to go out and find something happening by 8pm, where events are planned around ensuring that something is always on rather than around maximizing attendance.
A distributed venue network for community arts and culture
The gap in regular, smaller-scale cultural life
Cultural events and public gatherings in the Greater Malé area are infrequent by the standards of a vibrant capital city, often limited to large-scale productions. Regular, smaller events that could provide ongoing opportunities for interaction and engagement within and across communities are missing. The general mindset toward public events has oriented around larger productions that need relatively big audience counts to be sustainable, whether to turn a profit on tickets or to justify the logistics, organizing, and staffing costs for events held by organizations. Unless you can sell out a substantial venue, holding an event often does not make sense. Events are occasional rather than constant, artists and performers need to be already established to justify a booking, and ordinary residents have few options on any given evening for cultural engagement or social participation outside their homes.
The lack of an established arts policy to support a local scene with the capacity to sustain a constant event calendar, combined with the scarcity of smaller venues that can make smaller events viable, perpetuates this. When the only available spaces are large, small productions cannot be sustainable because they need a certain audience size just to cover costs. When spaces are small, even just 15 – 20 people, events become viable with much smaller audiences. An emerging artist can build a following of 15 dedicated fans before needing to fill a larger room. A poetry reading or acoustic set can happen with a handful of attendees and still feel like a success. The economics of cultural life shift entirely when venue size matches the scale of the community.
A distributed network of mini-venues
The proposal is a network of small community spaces spread across the city – mini-venues that can host intimate events, readings, performances, screenings, and gatherings – with the goal of ensuring that every resident can access one of these spaces within a short walking distance, no matter where they live or work. These do not need to be purpose-built cultural centres. They can be as small as a single room accommodating 15 people, or as informal as an outdoor area with woven mats for seating.
Implementation works through partnerships. Cafes, restaurants, and businesses can host or adopt spaces: a restaurant's upper deck becomes an evening venue, a cafe's back room hosts weekly trivia nights, an unused retail space becomes a reading room. Spaces near areas with good lighting and foot traffic work well. Companies can sponsor spaces through small CSR contributions that cover the cost of having someone operate the location during evening hours. The spaces themselves can be designed affordably with sofas, crate seating, bean bags, woven mats for floor seating, fairy lights, plants, art on the walls, a shelf of books. The aesthetic can be warm and inviting without being expensive because what matters is creating environments where people want to spend time and where artists feel they can perform.
An approach for establishing these spaces is to first focus on a network of mini-venues at a smaller scale, to provide enrichment directly to local communities. By working with city councils and businesses, these tiny, low-cost spaces can be made available for booking by local artists, creatives, and volunteers. The goal is to ensure that every community member can access these intellectual and cultural hubs within a 15-minute walking radius.
Partnerships with local cafes and restaurants can further expand the network, as these establishments can host their own events – quiz nights, music shows, small exhibits – and list their event calendars in a central online registry. To encourage community-led initiatives, support can be provided and incentives set up for residents to establish book clubs and other grassroots programs, to meet regularly in the mini-venues or existing public spaces, with prizes for the best-performing models of community engagement. Along with this kind of mini-venue network, permanent public mini-exhibits can be set up across the city, showcasing art displays, videos, and audio readings of literature, further integrating third spaces into the fabric of the community.
Maintaining a full calendar before a local scene develops
One challenge with any new cultural infrastructure is maintaining momentum before a critical mass of local artists and audiences has developed. If spaces sit empty waiting for bookings, they lose their purpose. The solution is to have easy, repeatable programming that can fill any night that has not been booked by a local artist or performer – screenings of copyright-free classic films on projectors, evenings where people can play board games or read while music plays, readings of poetry by local and international poets, book club discussions, trivia quiz nights. These require minimal logistics and can be run by a single consistent staff member. They serve as the baseline that keeps spaces active and visible, and as word spreads and more artists become aware of the venues, the proportion of nights booked by local creatives will grow and the filler programming can scale back.
An online directory and social media presence would list all events across all venues, with each evening's schedule published in the afternoon so that anyone in the city can find something to attend on any given night. This visibility is crucial: people need to know what is happening and where. As the network matures, the directory becomes a cultural calendar for the entire city – a single place to find out what is on tonight, whether it is a poetry reading in one neighbourhood, a film screening in another, or a live acoustic set somewhere else. The cumulative effect is a city where there is always something happening, where cultural participation becomes routine rather than exceptional, and where emerging artists have a viable path from performing for 15 people to gradually building larger audiences.
The ultimate goal is to foster a high level of community participation, with a medium-term target for an average of at least 50% of the population in each neighbourhood to attend a community third space event at least once per month. As the mini-venue network becomes established and community engagement increases, the next step would be to identify and repurpose larger spaces, such as community centres, to create more versatile third spaces that can accommodate a wider range of activities and cater to diverse demographics.
Cabinet decision outcome
Following circulation of the Public Policy Lab third spaces paper, government announced a policy focus on creating a third space for youth, formalized in a Cabinet decision. A youth hub venue subsequently launched. This demonstrated that advocacy grounded in clear analysis can move policy from concept to implementation – the paper identified the gap, framed the rationale, and the policy response followed.
The framework presented here expands beyond youth to address third spaces across all demographics and scales. The youth hub is a starting point, not the full picture. The venue network proposal, the community cultural programming model tested in the pilot, and the longer-term vision for neighbourhood-level and city-wide third spaces all represent next steps that build on what the Cabinet decision set in motion.
For third spaces to be successful, they must be embraced and utilized by the community. Successful implementation requires collaboration between various stakeholders – partnerships between government agencies, private sector entities, and non-governmental organizations that can provide resources, expertise, and support for the development and ongoing operation of third spaces. The pilot findings confirm the model works at a small scale. The venue network proposal provides a path to scaling it. The policy question is whether the kind of infrastructure that makes a city feel alive – the constant hum of small events, the knowledge that there is always something happening somewhere, the option to go out on a Monday evening and end up watching a film with strangers – will be treated as a priority alongside the more visible forms of urban development.