Use Anchor Tenants to Create “Third Spaces”
“When taking a seat at the Down Home Diner, indeed at any coffee bar or lunch counter, people feel they have a license to speak with others and others have a license to speak with them. On occasion strangers engage in spontaneous conversation, getting to know one another. Testing others and trying things out on them, people want to find out whether those different from themselves are sincere; happily, many discover they are. People generally leave these encounters with a good feeling about one another, as though they are recognizing that they have experienced something profound. Indeed, they have - they have made human contact across the assumed barriers of race, ethnicity, and other differences.”
Union Market DC
Lunch counter seating
In retail or market management, “anchor tenants” are meant to be the crowd drawers [3, 6]. These are the tenants which draw in the largest number of customers. In planning for social interactions in a community-based food hall, the best anchor tenants are the establishments which encourage the highest number of social interactions. Examples of these are diners, coffee bars, lunch counters, and pubs. The objective is to provide areas where residents of the community will comfortably drop by, offer and be open for conversations with others.
Anderson, in his ethnographic study on the Reading Terminal Market, identified the “Down Home Diner” as one such place where interaction is almost always sure to happen among strangers. Citing the way that the stools are set up, he theorized that sitting in a place like this equates to thinking that one has permission to speak to others and also effectively giving consent for others to talk with them [1].
Oldenburg introduced the concept of “third places” as comfortable places where people gather, in between home and work [4]. Highlighting the concept of socialization in a public space, he traced the need for “third places” as a way to meet other people and de-stress from work, without having to host a social gathering in one’s home [4]. He identified pubs or taverns as “third places” designed for social interaction. People go to pubs and taverns because they would like to meet people. They signify that they are open to being approached by others [4, 5]. Oldenburg highlighted the comfort which people felt in just dropping by and engaging in conversations with anyone else who might be in the neighborhood pub. In a recent interview with the 360 Magazine, Oldenburg identified affordable coffee houses as new “third places.” [2]
Granville Market, Vancouver
Lunch counter seating for a soup stall
A coffee place with public seating area
In using diners, coffee bars, lunch counters, and pubs as anchor tenants for social interaction, one must remember that “third places” are ultimately “created” by the communities themselves. Thus, the best stalls are the ones which are owned and operated by members of the communities themselves, hire workers who are local as well, and function similar to public spaces, in the sense that they are open and welcoming to everyone.
Sources:
Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., c 2011. 1st ed.).
“360 Magazine Talks with Sociologist Who Defined ‘Third Places’ (United Kingdom, n.d.)
'Cultivating Development, Trends, and Opportunities at the Intersection of Food and Real Estate', (Washington, DC, USA, Urban Land Institute, 2016).
Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Marlowe & Company, New York, 1989).
Robert Sommer, Personal Space: the Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, N.J Prentice-Hall, 1969).
David Studdert and Sophie Watson, Markets as Sites for Social Interaction: Spaces of Diversity, Public Spaces Series (Bristol, UK, Published for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by Policy Press, 2006).