URBAN RENEWAL
The Buzz around Thirdspaces &
Urban Renewal
BY KATE THOMPSON-DUWE
In his article,‘ Third Space First’, author Erling Fossen notes the following:“ Real estate is no longer about buildings, but how we use the urban fabric to create communities that are economically and socially sustainable. That’ s a completely new ball game for real estate developers. But it’ s very good news for the rest of us.”
At the centre of this consciousness is the concept of‘ Thirdspaces’. The late urban theorist Edward Soja, who penned‘ Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places’( 1996), described this concept in an interview with author Christian Borch as follows:“ I use Thirdspace to refer to a particular way of thinking about and interpreting socially produced space. It is a way of thinking that sees the spatiality of our lives, the human geographies in which we live, as having the same scope and critical significance as the historical and social dimensions of our lives.”
To truly understand Thirdspace, it is important to understand the terms“ Firstspace” and“ Secondspace”. The blog,‘ there’ s no space like home’ unpacks Soja’ s explanation of these phrases as follows:
“ Firstspace is the‘ real’ space – the urban built form of physical buildings that can be mapped and seen. Secondspace is the‘ imagined’ representational space – i. e. how the space is perceived, seen and argued over. In urban settings, this would be evident through, for example, the role of marketing and redevelopment projects.
“ Thirdspace takes this thinking further – it combines First and Second space to create what Soja describes as,‘ a fully lived space, a simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual locus of structured individuality and collective experience and agency’. Thirdspace, then, is the experience of life in the Firstspace mediated through Secondspace expectations.”
36 MAY 2017 SA Real Estate Investor www. reimag. co. za