SDf 2024 - seattleites find belonging in third places
Third places are glimpses into understanding how we build community in cities. For us at Framework, our 2024 Seattle Design Festival (SDF) installation starts a larger exploration of how urban planners and designers can foster “civic soul,” third places often being the places where this soul grows and thrives.
On August 17th and 18th, 2024 we displayed our installation “Postcards to Third Places” at Lake Union Park as part of the SDF. Over two days, we invited the public to share their appreciation for their favorite Seattle third places – the gathering spaces and incubators for art, creativity, and community care that are essential to urban life in Seattle. We wanted to get the community talking about our favorite local third places, express the value these places bring to our community, and offer people a way to share some love with their third places.
For a deeper discussion on the concept that inspired our installation, check out our last blog post.
Postcards to Third Places
Our installation for Seattle Design Festival 2024 asks visitors to write postcards to local community hubs.
An evolving installation
Throughout the weekend, visitors hung their postcards for all to see.
designing our “third place”
Our installation aimed to create a temporary, homey space for hanging out, having dialogue, and reflecting on the impact of third places in our lives.
The construction of the installation was an opportunity to work sustainably and promote Seattle-based third places in the process. Donated from Ballard Reuse, recycled doors formed the base of our installation. The doors displayed postcards designed by the public during the festival and framed a temporary “third place” environment.
We risograph printed our postcards at Paper Press Punch, utilizing a unique printing method that made each of the postcards special with a hand-printed and tactile quality. Festivalgoers could decorate their postcards with custom stamps, drawings and stories of what made their favorite third place special to them.
House of Doors
To build our installation, we repurposed doors donated from Ballard Reuse. We love that the mix and match style of doors speaks to the character that develops in third places over time. Together, the doors attached together create a temporary, mini-third place, a place where Seattle Design Festival goers could gather and write postcards to their beloved community hubs.
Where are our third places and what do they mean to us?
Over two days, the public wrote and decorated over 200 postcards in appreciation of their favorite spaces for food & retail, outdoor and indoor recreation, arts & culture experiences, and community resources like libraries and religious spaces. Amongst the most popular third places were Elliot Bay Book Company; the Ballard Farmer’s Market; Garfield Play Field; Schultzy’s Bar and Grill; Magnuson Dog Park and many of the Seattle Public libraries.
Throughout the festival, we had conversations with individuals who helped us understand what value third places bring to their own lives, and what makes these places essential to the community. Here are some highlights:
Third places can be places of respite, providing safe and comfortable spaces to unwind and relax. Some Seattleites have found these spaces in independent retail spaces, like the “Relaxation that comes from going through old records and CD’s” (written to Al’s Music Video & Games, U-District). Others in community spaces where they can be active. For one festivalgoer, the Central District’s Meredith Matthews East Madison YMCA is, “the perfect place to go when [they’re] overwhelmed, and the place to swim with [their] best friends.”
In our changing climate, respite is coupled with the need for refuge from extreme weather. One participant mentioned, “I work from home but when it gets too hot, I have to go elsewhere.” For this reason, they’ve found much-needed relief at Stoup Brewing in Capitol Hill.
Engaging with kids
Seattle Design Festival draws a lot of families, and we wanted to make sure our activity was kid-friendly. We created stamps that allowed people of all ages to customize their postcards.
Being Creative Together
Seattle Design Festival attendees sat at a cafe table and customized postcards.
One third of postcards were written to outdoor recreation spaces around Seattle, which included public parks, streets and plazas and natural areas. Appreciating natural beauty is often a primary value to Seattle’s favorite third places - like at Elliot Bay Park, on the Expedia Campus, where Seattleites go “to watch sunset and picnic and spot some seals.”
What often emerged from our conversations, was the issue of equity in third places: Who can access certain third places? Who cannot? And how does accessibility and inclusivity shape our favorite Seattle third places? With nearly 40% of the postcards written to private food and retail spaces, the issue of privatization and accessibility in third places is at the forefront. Access to these third places requires you to spend money, and may discriminate against the unhoused and otherwise struggling.
However certain third places were recognized for countering this status quo. “The affordability of donation-based and free Sundays and exposure for art students and art at large,” makes the Henry Art Gallery in U-District a preferred third place for many. In a similar vein, places like the KEXP Gathering Space are celebrated for cultivating inclusive environments for working and gathering, as described by one festivalgoer. Third places are spaces of belonging and interacting with our diverse community, especially for members of marginalized populations who might face difficulty finding solace in their daily routines.
Crunching the numbers
Different colored postcards corresponded with different third place types: Food & Retail (cafes, bookstores, markets, etc.); Outdoor Recreation (public parks, streets and plazas, natural areas etc.); Arts & Culture spaces (music venues, art & science museums, performing arts, etc.); Indoor Recreation (public pools, fitness studios, roller rinks, etc.); and Community Buildings (libraries, community centers, religious spaces etc.).
Mapping third places
In addition to writing postcards, visitors to our installation also pinned their favorite third places on a map of Seattle.
What remains clear is that Seattle third places are meaningful spaces for building community, whether that means running into familiar faces, meeting new friends, or serving as a central meeting point or neighborhood watering hole. At the Rainier Beach Community Center, an educator appreciates the opportunity to unexpectedly, “run into [their] students and their families.” Another participant mentioned how they, “met a whole group of friends [at the Seattle Bouldering Project] while climbing every Sunday”. In Downtown Seattle, Inside is a transformative arts studio and event space, and one postcard writer’s “favorite place to build community and to feel like [they] belong.”
Ultimately, a third place is somewhere we feel cared for - “Thank you for always being welcoming and taking care of me and my bike” someone writes to Good Weather Bicycle & Repair Shop, in Capitol Hill.
Framework team members relax after assembling the installation.
Written by Leila Jackson @Framework
postcards to third places
As Urban Designers and Planners, we’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about how cities in Washington can prepare for the population growth that is expected to occur in the next 20 years. Front and center in these conversations are elements like land use, housing, transportation, and other infrastructure that makes the city tick. But when we talk to cities about their goals, it’s often the intangibles that weigh heavy on their visions for the future–“a city with character,” “a vibrant community,” “a thriving metropolis of arts and culture”…
At the same time, we’re seeing conversations about the disappearance of third places and the trend towards loneliness and disconnection from community. As cities like Seattle grow, rising rent prices and the pressures of development can squeeze out places that act as vital hubs for art, culture, connection, and community. This loss is apparent through projects like Vanishing Seattle, “a media movement that documents displaced and disappearing institutions, small businesses, and cultures of Seattle - often due to development and gentrification - and celebrates the spaces and communities that give the city its soul.”
The disappearance of third places is not unique to Seattle, nor is it a new issue. As far back as the 1990s, Sociologist Ray Oldenburg was recommending that urban planners course correct away from the disparate suburban pattern designed to “protect people from community rather than connect them to it.” He argued that people need third places–or places outside of the home (“first place”) and office (“second place”). These neighborhood hubs, he wrote, are vital for fostering civic engagement, creating webs of mutual aid, and allowing people to experience the “joy in living” that comes from enjoying the company of those who live and work around you.
Postcards to Third Places
Our Seattle Design Festival installation will invite visitors to customize a postcard for a beloved community hub.
Nurturing our third places
It’s hard to imagine a “vibrant” city that doesn’t have third places. Meeting new people, exchanging ideas, creating together… It all requires space, not to mention the need for a public realm that allows people to put the fruits of community on display. So why are these qualities so hard to plan for? Why, decades later, are we facing the same problem?
Sometimes we try to solve problems with data: Can we quantify the economic benefits of a third place? Can we convince decision makers that protecting community does indeed pencil out? Can we determine a third place formula that can be modeled, replicated…?
Sure, maybe. But if third places teach us anything, it’s that community solidarity is a powerful force. So what if we started by talking about our third places, learning about the places that other people hold dear, and sending those places some love?
The vision
Using recycled doors and cafe tables, our installation aims to embody the spirit of a third place, where DIY elements signal community participation in a space, and add beloved character.
Seattle design festival
Postcards to Third Places is an installation that invites participants to “send love” to their beloved community hubs in the form of a risoprinted postcard. This project will debut at Seattle Design Festival, where we’ll carve out our own temporary “third place,” an installation made of recycled doors and cafe tables. Visitors will customize their postcard and mark the location on a map, telling a story of the places that Seattlites hold dear. Finally, we’ll send the postcards out, a small act of love for these community institutions.
This festival won’t be the first or last time we contemplate how urban planners can advocate for and create cities that allow culture to thrive. After the festival, we hope to connect with many of these Seattle third places to learn more about how they’ve survived the pressures of the last decade. Stay tuned for blog posts with interviews with these community institutions, and reach out to us if you know someone who we should get in touch with!
Creating our third place installation
Donated from Ballard Reuse, recycled doors form the structure of our third place installation, and will be used to display postcards created by guests..
Written by Hope Freije @Framework
Kids, joy, and flipping the table on who gets to influence the future
It turns out the next generation has a clear idea of what they want for society and the planet. As planners and urban designers, it’s up to us to create new avenues for youth engagement and to advocate for kids’ influence on decision-making. At Framework, we’re proud of our approach to youth engagement in a variety of projects and look forward to giving kids more of a role in the future.
Traditional engagement efforts in community planning play to the strengths of people with an abundance of time and access to information. Night meetings at city hall, public hearings, and prototypical focus groups revolve around the nine-to-five work schedule and assume people can break away from their life obligations around dinner time. A check-the-box mindset on public engagement too often defaults to these perfunctory outlets and the result amplifies the voices of older and wealthier residents. This is frustrating, because it ensures that the narrow interests held by this subset of the population become the basis for decisions affecting entire communities. Consequently, the ideas and aspirations of people of color, low-income residents, renters, and kids are lost, or, at best, underrepresented and underappreciated.
This doesn’t have to be the endgame of public discourse in urban design and planning. Luckily, many cities are increasingly aware of the existing engagement deficits and are looking to connect with a wider range of people that more accurately represent the community at large.
As a firm that puts people at the heart of planning and design, Framework has maximized inclusive engagement since our earliest projects. And over the past year, we’ve turned it up a notch when finding creative ways to emphasize the voices and ideas of one of our most overlooked groups in society: kids.
First, our honest appreciation for kids
Children, teenagers, and young adults inherently see and experience our communities differently. Not only are they incredibly insightful about the issues that adults have been trying to solve for decades, but they bring a perspective of joyfulness and scale that’s often challenging for jaded, full-grown adults to fathom. Unleashing their ideas, however, requires much more thought than asking them to speak up during a city council meeting.
Here are a few examples of how we’re putting kids’ perspectives at center stage in our projects.
Seattle Design Festival – Design Your Own Neighborhood
Last summer, Framework developed a fun kid-friendly activity for the Seattle Design Festival called “Design Your Own Neighborhood.” Our installation invited festival-goers to create an inclusive neighborhood that supports community gathering, maximizes green/open space, and accommodates a variety of homes, retail/service offerings, and public amenities.
Anticipating the masses of families that would descend upon Lake Union Park in mid-summer, we intentionally designed the activity with kids in mind. Our components—a gridded ground cloth and colored boxes indicating homes, retail, and amenities—were simple and small so children could easily maneuver and place their buildings. Plus, the flexible, yet gamified rules spurred creativity and even instilled some competition among these young designers. Our favorite outcomes, however, were kids’ narratives of their creations.
Comprehensive Planning in Milton and Sultan – From Crayons and LEGOs to Visual Preference Boards
Youth engagement is essential in our comprehensive planning projects. As we envision the next 20-years in cities across the state, we’re especially diligent about kids’ involvement as demand for more kid-focused activities and destinations intensifies in many communities. It’s also clear that kids are keenly aware of the community needs for 30-to-40 year-olds—their age by the end of the planning period.
In Sultan, we rolled out a huge vinyl basemap and invited kids (and their parents) to scribble notes and place LEGOs to indicate where they want to see new homes, schools, shops, restaurants, parks, trails, and safe streets. The activity—inspired by James Rojas’ Placeit concept—is approachable for many ages and abilities, place-based and aspirational, and interactive at many levels: someone can place a single LEGO or have a detailed discussion with us about their ideas.
We’re also visiting schools and tying into other events that teenagers are already attending. In Milton, we asked middle schoolers to map their favorite places and dream about new destinations. We also had the opportunity to gather specific design ideas for Hill Tower Park, which gave us invaluable information about kids’ desired programming like a climbing structure and splash pad.
Arts and Culture in Renton – Wishing Wells and High School Surveys
Framework is also involving youth in our arts and culture plans. In Renton, we asked kids to toss their wishes for new public art projects, cultural spaces, and more into a makeshift wishing well—in exchange for a piece of candy, of course! We also had the opportunity to join an art teacher’s event where high school students felt comfortable filling out a survey about new creative classes, performance spaces, and art installations in the city.
Let’s Face it: Planning for kids is planning for the future
If we really want safer streets, equitable development, diverse housing options, and vibrant public spaces in our communities, then we ought to elevate the perspectives of children. Kids approach the built, social, and natural world with a balance of curiosity, imagination, and vulnerability that can be equally practical and inspiring. They’re regularly looking for adventure and play, and, at the same time, undeniably vulnerable to the harms of a warming climate and an unsafe, inaccessible public realm—not to mention entirely disadvantaged in a culture that revolves around cars. Our youth are also keenly aware of our societal struggles for social justice and climate action. So, taken seriously, the realities of kids’ lived experience can inform design interventions and policy moves that produce a more comfortable, joyful, and socially just world for everyone.
As our work progresses, we’ll be constantly looking for more opportunities to engage with these thoughtful and imaginative members of our society.
Written by Tyler Quinn-Smith @Framework