Why "third places" reduce street crime

According to Diana Budds (https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/31/17414768/starbucks-third-place-bathroom-public) third places can be thought off as a community’s living room: churches, coffee shops, gyms, hair salons, post offices, main streets, bars, beer gardens, bookstores, parks, community centers, and gift shops—inexpensive places where people come together and life happens.

“There is a reason there was such a strong fight over lunch counters in the civil rights movement: The spaces of our daily lives are very important for our cities and our society,” Justin Garrett Moore, an urban planner and executive director of New York City’s Public Design Commission, tells Curbed. “In the urban design world we talk a lot about the ‘human experience’ of our shared built environment. Budds states that many of the important and even defining exchanges, interactions, and even altercations that help define our human experience of the city happen in the blurred public-private zone of third spaces.

“I believe architecture can change people’s lives and change them for the better,” says David Polzin, the executive director of design at Cannon Design. Cannon Design constructed the first community center at Lemay, a working-class suburban town outside of St. Louis.

“When you take an economically and socially struggling community like Lemay you hope [this center] reduces crime, gets kids off the street, makes people healthier, creates a space for meetings seniors that wouldn’t otherwise be able to have. It’s just an incredible improvement and also instills a sense of pride in one’s community. Civic buildings and public buildings like this go a long way to represent who we are. They should be commensurate with our pride of place.”

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