mhoye (temporarily spooky)I don’t spend a lot of time on here telling you all how smart my kids are but today I was talking with my son about the idea of a “Third Place” and he mentioned how all these “coming of age” stories he’s read have kids "hanging out at the mall”, and what a weird, totally alien idea that is to him and his friends. “Did they even have places you could sit down or not buy anything then? None of us have money.”
“I wish I lived in a world where I had a third space that wasn’t my room” and God Damn I felt that.
If we don’t want kids staring at screens all day then maybe we should build a world where online multiplayer chat isn’t the only third space that teenagers have available to them.
GhoulieR
Fear and Tooting in Las Vegas@mhoye But how else will we habituate them to the Panopticon?
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@mhoye Such places do get designed occasionally.
The design for a new children's playground was being discussed. "But," someone complained, "that feature there provides a shelter from the weather: during the evening it'll be inhabited by gangs of teenagers hanging around and misbehaving [under-age drinking etc]."
To which the answer was "yes, that's right, that's by design."
The idea was that as teenagers are going to hang around and misbehave somewhere or other anyway, it's better if it's somewhere predictable, so that for example the police can keep an occasional eye on them to make sure they're safe.
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary"police"
"make sure they're safe"
I think you accidentally put things together that don't belong in the same sentence...
majick@TimWardCam @pteryx @mhoye It seems pretty safe to assume you're middle- or better class white based on this statement. Your experience is the opposite of universal just in case you weren't aware.
@TimWardCam @pteryx @mhoye I'm not sure how that's relevant to the point? Your experience of cops that don't hassle people for having skin dissimilar to yours is very much not the lived experience of... nearly everyone who isn't in your little suburb. You, my friend, are the economy that police exist to protect against everyone else—try to internally reframe things a bit from "I sat in a cop car for a while" to what it's like for most people to be sitting in a cop car.
Cop-ridden third spaces are, for a vast number of people, not third spaces at all. They're no-fly zones.
Kerfuffle@pteryx @TimWardCam @mhoye
They do belong in the same sentence. If that doesn't apply to where you are, then where you are has shit police.
They do belong in the same sentence. If that doesn't apply to where you are, then where you are has shit police.
@kerfuffle @pteryx @TimWardCam Sure but that’s a very, very common problem that isn’t the teenagers’ to solve.
@mhoye @pteryx @TimWardCam You didn't say "teenagers should build a world", you said "we should build a world". If a suggestion for playground design gets shot down because police are a threat to safety, which I can tell you is a crazy concept in the part of the world where I'm from, then it sounds like "we" have a lot of building to do to remedy that first.
@mhoye @kerfuffle @pteryx It's their parents'. Most of whom are happy with their local police, as witness the fact that they can't be arsed to vote in local elections.
The Lack Thereof 
@kerfuffle @pteryx @TimWardCam @mhoye
At least in the US, if there are police watching my kids to "keep them out of trouble", then the police are actually going to try and saddle them with a criminal record for some trivial bullshit.
Copd don't advance in their careers by keeping people safe, whatever definition you give it. They advance in their careers by having a big arrest count. That is the metric that matters to them. And it's easy to arrest kids.
@lackthereof @kerfuffle @pteryx @mhoye Not round here (though quite possibly in other parts of the UK - it's not a uniform service).
Example.
I was spending a shift with a pair of Specials. (Special Constables are part-time volunteer police who are likely to have normal full time day jobs as well. One of this pair was a secretary as her day job, but when Friday night came around she left her husband to look after the children and put on the uniform.)
After doing some more boring stuff, "right, we'll go and check on the kids at the such-and-such rec" they said, so we coasted into the car park, engine and lights off. Got out of the car. Teenagers scattered into the darkness of the recreation ground.
All except one, who was about thirteen years old and too drunk to run away - indeed to start with she was too drunk to stand up, so he mates had left her lying in a heap in the car park. So the Special walked out a little way into the darkness and called out "hey, there's one of your mates here, she can't manage on her own, she needs looking after." Eventually one of the other teenagers sidled into view. "This one a friend of yours?" Yes. "Where does she live?" Over there. "Is there anyone at home?" Yes, her mother. "Well, I think you'd better take her home to her mother, don't you? - you can't leave her out here in that state."
And the Special gave this slightly older teenager her card - "this is my personal mobile number, call me in the morning to tell me your mate's OK." And one of the other kids appeared out of the darkness to help take the drunk girl home.
That's how you're supposed to do policing, isn't it?
@TimWardCam
That sounds fantastic, and is absolutely not how that same situation would have turned out in the US. It is hard to conceive of such a rational first responder deployment.
At 18 I was detained by police in a public park for "trespassing" (being in the park past dusk).
@lackthereof My lad and some of his mates were camping in a not-public piece of land belonging to one of the #Cambridge colleges. (No, we didn't know where he was or what he was doing, but he'd have answered his phone if we'd called him - that was the unspoken deal.)
Eventually the police came by. Bunch of teenage boys in a tent on private land without permission, almost certainly with under-age drink, and who knows what they might have been smoking.
"All right lads, you've had your fun, time to go home now." And that was that.
(Of course one reason why the police know where to find teenagers misbehaving is because that's where they themselves were misbehaving when they were teenagers.)
Ben Foote
Eleanor Saitta@benpocalypse
@mhoye interesting to note that most of those are de facto very male spaces. Far fewer third spaces for teenage girls.
@mhoye interesting to note that most of those are de facto very male spaces. Far fewer third spaces for teenage girls.
tom jennings@dymaxion @benpocalypse @mhoye
Space to do things largely accountable to the people using it. And no "productivity" metrics. Fuck all that. Hanging out "doing nothing" is art making. Trust is essential. Accountability is important but they had nothing to to with outcomes.
cognitively accessible math@mhoye Perhaps it is Golden Opportunity Time for radicalizing them in real life.
Mike Conley (:mconley) ⚙️@mhoye Speaking anecdotally, I'm back in my (small) hometown this weekend, and the skatepark was hoppin'. Demand appears to be high.
GeePawHill@mhoye One of the reasons I'm known as "GeePaw": I have kept my house open to teenagers for 35 years. Just a place to hang, still with rules, but different rules than their parents have.
I had two such houses growing up, first Tony's, and later Ed's. Without those two mentors and the third place they provided, I doubt I would have made it out of small-town Kansas alive.
Hugh Stimson@mhoye Skate parks are surely some of the highest return-on-investment infrastructure a society can build.
@mhoye How many covered skate parks are there in #Vancouver ? I can think of one.
Not enough for a rainy city that still has some teenagers left in it.
Frost, glow wolf 🐺
@mhoye Also there'll always be a subset of the population "staring at screens all day" because that's the only place they can find community! There's "regular" queer people who you might be able to find offline, but then there's a whole tree of increasingly smaller nested subcultures that will probably always need the internet. Like, I'm therian (transspecies), and have literally only met other therians online. I bet local therians do exist but they're probably hard to find.
Bennolius 😷⚡@mhoye but we built a skate park! That's what all kids do, right?
@carbsrule_en how do you do fellow skaters
Howard Chu @ Symas@mhoye public libraries are still a thing. I prob spent most of my teenage free time in them.
Grant R. Vousden-Dishington
juliette
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦
technicat
Hippo 🍉@mhoye this. Totally. As a former kid I feel the lack of hangout spaces especially amongst my city-dwelling friends. When they came home we had the whole country side to dwell in, but urban areas tended to have at best a "downstairs" from the building. And with added restrictions about when and where and how far to go (not always without reason but still)
Even now, for me, urban "hanging out" usually means a pub or something which while fine for a few times is rather limited
DecaturNature@mhoye I didn't have a built "third place" as a kid in a exurb/suburb, but I think that role was filled to some extent by roaming around my neighborhood, which is not an option my kids have. Often this was walking, by myself or with friends, often well past dark (no curfew, few cars). When I was older and my friends had access to cars, this could include gatherings at all types of places, often without permission.
Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉@mhoye this is why I think a city is a better place to raise kids than the suburbs. There's more trouble to get into, but there's more everything to get into, and kids need to be able to get into stuff to become fully formed adults. They need other people and places to go. They need independence and having good mass transit and walkable public places that are never isolated makes independence possible.
Wyatt H Knott@mhoye We made our own "third spaces" no one did it for us. Yes, there were lots of malls, but there were also airport control towers, arboretums, school auditoriums (after hours, at schools we did not attend, and had to break into), commons (concrete "parks" in the middle of intersections,) tree houses (made with lumber stolen from local developments) etc.
Anyone pining for civic mandated "Third Spaces" should be forced to watch Over the Edge.
@Wyatt_H_Knott This is absolute nonsense. How the hell do you tell a teenager in 2025 that they should break into a school after hours to hang in the auditorium. And airport control towers? What?
@mhoye Well, we didn't have to break into the airport control tower. Logan used to have an observation deck below the controller's space, pretty sure it got closed after 9/11. The school auditorium was at Mass Art, which was across the street from a complex of Boston Public Schools, which we attended, and wasn't really locked. We snuck in, but this was before everything had ID readers on the doors.
@mhoye My point is that a bit of harmless juvenile delinquency has become felonious behavior in the surveillance state, and it's a shame. I'm not advocating anything, just reporting what ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN MY LIFE.
@Wyatt_H_Knott the world you did that in doesn’t exist anymore.
@mhoye I'm well aware
sahqon@Wyatt_H_Knott @mhoye But we didn't usually get the cops called on us for being young unsupervised children breaking into spaces or teenage hooligans sitting around on concrete. Everybody was just happy if nothing was on fire and left it at that. I mean, I routinely ran around with neighborhood kids, average age 7 when I was 3, even out of the damn village and then town.
arclight@mhoye Every public space has been monetized so there is no place to gather without paying or being harassed for not being the "right kind of consumer"
Vibed-Out Megaslop
Martina Neumayer@mhoye Well.. There was once one a like. Back then in the 80's. People shouldn't destroy it.
Wendy Nather@mhoye The pandemic and economy really have done a number on our kids.
@wendynather The kids could be fine, if we made places for them to be fine.
@mhoye As long as they can be fine together. But there’s still Covid.
Morgan ⚧️@wendynather @mhoye if those places were well ventilated, especially if the kids wore masks, COVID wouldn't be such a threat. The rich and government officials aren't getting it nearly as much as most working class people, because all of their buildings got the upgrades that should've gone in schools etc
Ertain@mhoye do y'all have a public library where kids are allowed to talk? There should certainly be more third spaces but that's a start for a lot of us
Edited to be more specific bc the replies reminded me libraries differ by location lol
May Likes Toronto 🎃@raphaelmorgan I rarely think of libraries as a hang out place, since talking is discouraged.
Our local libraries charge for room rentals for private events. It's a safe place and a 3rd space, but not a hang out space.
@mayintoronto @mhoye that's a good point. I didn't think of room fees or no talking rules, and I also forgot that most kids don't like talking quietly lol
sunset at the dog park@mayintoronto
I'm in library school and it's an increasing trend to encourage talking and community building.
And teen only spaces where they can specifically be a bit more free from older adult judging and shushing.
Here in SF community rooms are free if booked in advance as long as they are open to the public to join.
@raphaelmorgan @mhoye
I'm in library school and it's an increasing trend to encourage talking and community building.
And teen only spaces where they can specifically be a bit more free from older adult judging and shushing.
Here in SF community rooms are free if booked in advance as long as they are open to the public to join.
@raphaelmorgan @mhoye
Dune (1987) wife arc(?)@thesquirrelfish @mayintoronto @raphaelmorgan @mhoye in the last town I lived in (where I sat on the library board) we had a space specifically for teens. and as long as they're not too rowdy it was fine for them to hangout and talk and stuff
@nofunoverlord @thesquirrelfish @mayintoronto @mhoye sounds like this is a "depends heavily on where you live" sorta thing, and I hope more libraries follow suit. Also, again, more non-library non-commercial third spaces.
My local library where I lived as a teenager had a teen spot like that too, and my sister and I hung out there all the time. That's why it was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this thread, but even there we had to be pretty quiet so it's certainly not a cure-all