Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade

The Hindu

a day ago

Have you noticed how in cities, we see places like Chinatown, Afghan Street, or Bengali corners? These are not the official names of those places, but the moment you enter them, you notice how different they are from the formal city around them. They are culturally vibrant and largely built by and for communities that don't belong to the region or country where the city exists. Such spaces, rich with life and meaning but unaccounted for in maps, are best understood through the concept of Thirdspace.
Thirdspace tells us that space is not just something we live in; it's something that lives in us. Shaped by emotion, identity, power, and resistance, it urges us to see how places such as street corners or protest sites are far more than physical locations. They are lived, remembered, and reimagined.
This concept was introduced by Edward Soja in his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), which builds on the influential work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974). Soja expands Lefebvre's idea of spatial triad into what he calls the trialectics of spatiality — a way of seeing space through three interrelated dimensions: Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace.
Trialectics of spatiality
A city can be measured by its buildings or population density. That's one kind of spatial understanding. But if you think about who planned the city, where certain communities live, and how zoning laws shape who belongs where, you're entering another kind of understanding. Finally, if you ask people how they live, remember, or resist in those places, you will have, yet again, a different understanding of space.
Firstspace (the perceived physical space) refers to the material space we can touch, measure, and map. It includes roads, buildings, parks, rivers, and railway tracks; everything you can record with data. While it seems neutral or objective, it is anything but. The physical placement of slums at city margins or the clustering of communities by religion or caste reflects histories of power and inequality. Firstspace is the focus of statistics, maps, and urban planning. And while it tells us what is there, it doesn't always explain why or for whom it was built.
Secondspace (the conceived ideological space) is how space is imagined and controlled by those with power, including urban planners, governments, and developers. This space is created in blueprints, master plans, zoning laws, and design philosophies. It reflects ideological visions about what space should be. For example, a city plan may declare a neighbourhood as a 'commercial zone' or mark certain areas as 'unsafe.' These decisions are not just technical, they reflect values, biases, and priorities. Colonial maps, gentrification projects, and housing segregation are all examples of Secondspace at work.
Thirdspace (the lived and experienced space) is where people actually live, remember, resist, and build meaning. It blends the physical (Firstspace) and the imagined (Secondspace) and goes beyond them. It's not something you can fully map or plan. Think of a government-assigned refugee colony, perhaps originally called First Main Street, where Afghan migrants live. It was not designed to be anything more than a housing zone. But over time, it transforms into a cultural hub — for instance, a street market during Eid, a place of music, food, and memory. The community itself brings meaning to the place and transforms it. That transformation, that layering of emotion, identity, and politics, is Thirdspace.
Space and identity
Thirdspace resists easy definition because it's always changing. It's where everyday lives play out in all its contradictions. It is also where marginalised communities, women, and migrants, assert their presence and resist dominant narratives.
Thirdspace gains even more significance when we add the lens of identity, particularly race, class, and gender. Feminist thinkers like Bell Hooks, Doreen Massey, and others have shown us how space is gendered and politicised. Who is allowed in public parks after dark? Why are urban layouts often built around male mobility and safety?
Bell Hooks speaks of the margin not as a place of exclusion, but as a space of resistance and imagination. Feminist perspectives stress intersectionality, urging us to see how gender, race, and class interact within lived experience. Through this lens, Thirdspace becomes a powerful way to understand not just how space is used, but who is erased or included in that usage.
Space in the urban
Although Soja focused primarily on urban contexts, Thirdspace is not exclusive to cities. It can be found wherever people live, resist, and negotiate meaning. A village square, for instance, may serve as a physical space for gatherings (Firstspace), a symbolic centre of tradition and hierarchy (Secondspace), and a site where local customs, gender roles, generational conflicts, and collective memory intersect (Thirdspace). Here, people meet not just to conduct rituals, but also to contest them, reinterpret them, and forge new relationships.
However, Soja emphasises urban contexts because cities are not only where tensions between the three spatialities become the most visible, it is also where they are most resisted. Urban spaces are sites of intense planning, regulation, surveillance, and segregation, making them ideal grounds to study how the 'experience' of space often diverges from its physical form. Cities are also where diverse populations collide, informal economies thrive, and where protest and public culture becomes visible. These layered realities are precisely what Thirdspace seeks to capture.
Think of Greenwich Village in New York. On one level, the village has an 18th-century street pattern and is designated as a historical district, which imposes strict regulations on renovation and physical alterations (Firstspace). It is also home to two major colleges, and urban planners and architects could have long imagined it as a historical and educational hub (Secondspace). Finally, with the presence of the Stonewall Inn, widely recognised as the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, the area carries deep emotional, symbolic, and cultural significance. It is associated with hipster culture, Pride, and histories of resistance. (Thirdspace).
Urban theory often leans too heavily on what can be mapped. What Thirdspace brings in is experience. It asks urban planners to understand how space is felt, not just designed. It values murals, street protests, informal markets, things that don't show up in satellite images but define the urban experience.
Resisting non-places
To understand Thirdspace better, it helps to compare it with Marc Augé's idea of 'non-places.' Non-places are the product of supermodernity — airports, malls, highways, and hotel rooms. These are spaces designed for functionality and transience. You pass through them, but they do not become part of your identity. There is no memory or belonging. They feel sterile, interchangeable, and emotionally vacant. In an airport lounge, no one asks your name. In a hotel lobby, the furniture looks identical regardless of the hotel being in Kochi or New York. These spaces are designed for movement, not memory; they value efficiency over attachment.
Soja's Thirdspace is in many ways a resistance to this flattening. It insists that even in the most alienating environments, people bring meaning. A shopping mall may be a non-place, but when local youth gather there to hang out, share music, or protest against a brand store that funds genocide, it becomes a Thirdspace. Their presence adds friction to the flow, subverts the design, and fills the space with memory, identity, and sometimes, dissent. Thus, Thirdspace not only becomes a critique of non-places but also presents itself as their potential antidote.
Thirdspace remains relevant wherever space is lived, contested, and reimagined, as it allows us to see beyond binaries. In a time of migration, digitisation, and polarisation, it offers a lens to see how we build belonging, memory, and resistance, perhaps in the most unexpected of places. It reminds us that space is never neutral. It is made and remade, and that while it may be planned by the powerful, it is lived and reshaped by the people who live, remember and resist within it. And in that living, there lies the possibility of transformation.
Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.