IDENTIFYING AND DEFINING THIRD PLACES IN URBAN AGEO, JAPAN

Abstract

In the book, “The Great Good Place”, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term ‘third places’ as a regularly visited place of refuge other than the home or workplace to commune with friends, neighbours, coworkers, and strangers (1989). In Europe, visiting third places have been established as part of the everyday routine, for example, the Italian taberna, British pubs and German bierstube (ibid). Destinations as third places appear to exist universally though vary between countries (Hisashige, n.d.). However Oldenburg does not introduce case studies in countries other than Europe and America. Therefore, this paper discovers and identifies the characteristics that construct the third places in Asian, using urban Ageo, Japan as a case study. Ageo is one of the largest bedroom cities in Saitama Prefecture that connects to the central business district of Tokyo and is distinctly planned with rings of urban and rural districts encircling Ageo Station. The main research methods used are surveys to locate the third places, and subsequently, visual surveys and comparisons to further investigate the features of the place to understand how these places are differentiated from other similar businesses or places (Mehta and Bosson, 2010). The outcome of the research showed that there are several hardware, software and “orgware” (Cho and Trivic, 2012) features that characterize third places. Furthermore, the results showed a strong demographical correlation between the types of users and types of third places.