Third place ecosystem in a hyper dense city : exploring the physical and social network in Hong Kong communities

Abstract

Contemporary urban life inevitably aggravates isolation among people and communities, especially in hyper dense mega city, which also increases the conflicts and split-up in society. However, social interaction among different individuals and groups could effectively alleviate these social issues. Everyday social interactions benefit people’s mental health, and also contribute to the social cohesion. ‘Third Place’ as formulated by Oldenburg is such a sociological concept, to describe places for community interaction and socializing within cities. To date, limited research has been conducted to identify specific and systemic characteristics of Third Place at the street-block scale, and how social dimension is interact with physical dimension of Third Place, and also in the context of hyper dense vertical cities. This research mainly employs case study and literature research methodology to explore the social and physical feature of Third Place ecosystem and the interrelationships between these two dimensions and aims to find interactive mechanism of Third Place and social interaction on different scale and identify the Third Place feature and typology in Hong Kong communities. The research takes 3 cases from HK, mainland China and Korea to study the characteristics of third place ecosystem and social network in different context. These cases are all high-dense cities and are different in terms of social condition, urban form and third place typology. In understanding the characteristics of Third Place and the interrelationships between Third Place ecosystems and social networks of urban communities, an urban design system for designing or optimizing both physical and social Third Place ecosystem at multi-scale is formulated. Through optimizing the ecosystem, fragmented and discontinuous social network gets reconnected. and Third Place ecosystems can be as soft urban infrastructure to achieve cohesion and co-existence among diverse people at the street-block scale of Hong Kong communities.