Thirdspaces: Soja and Bhabha's Third Space in the City

Thirdspaces, or the third space, is the concept with which the geographer Edward Soja and the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha describe the places where the categories we use to order the city, public and private, centre and periphery, ours and theirs, real and imagined, stop working and something hybrid appears. Soja formulated it in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996); Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994). Both start from a shared intuition: contemporary urban life does not fit the dichotomies of traditional planning, and the most interesting things happen in the interstices those dichotomies fail to see.

Edward Soja: Lefebvre's triad and lived space

Soja builds his idea on Henri Lefebvre and his spatial triad. Firstspace is physical and measurable, the space that maps chart. Secondspace is conceived space, that of the representations, ideologies and images through which the city is thought. Thirdspace is lived space: the one that emerges from everyday experience, where the real and the imagined mix and where domination and resistance coexist. Soja illustrates it with Los Angeles, a city of internal borders, of Latino neighbourhoods beside corporate enclaves, of places such as the Bonaventure Hotel or the streets of Boyle Heights that cannot be understood from the map or from official discourse, but only from those who inhabit them.

Homi Bhabha: hybridity and negotiated identities

Bhabha reaches the same place from postcolonial theory. His third space is the realm of enunciation where cultures meet and none keeps its purity: the migrant who is no longer from there and not yet from here, the neighbourhood where languages, foods and religions coexist, the cultural practice that translates and mixes. Bhabha calls that process hybridity and considers it productive, because it destabilises the colonial hierarchies that separated coloniser from colonised. Applied to the city, Bhabha's third space is where urban identity is negotiated every day rather than inherited.

Where the thirdspaces of the real city are

The thirdspaces of the real city are recognisable. Migrant markets where one shop sells goods from three continents. Shopping malls that work as public squares without being them. Vacant lots taken over by gardens, industrial sheds turned into temples, gyms and workshops, border neighbourhoods between two municipalities or two countries, such as Tijuana and San Diego, which Soja and Michael Dear studied as a single region. Also the digital spaces layered over the physical: the delivery app that reorganises the street or the rental platform that turns a home into a hotel. All of them escape zoning and census categories.

Consequences for planning and critiques of the concept

For planning, the concept has two consequences. The first is methodological: to understand a place it is not enough to measure it or read what has been said about it; one must observe how it is lived, who uses it and what it means to each group. The second is political: hybrid spaces are at once the most creative and the most vulnerable, because their indefinition leaves them outside legal protection and makes them easy targets for renewal and gentrification. Recognising them, giving them legal security and designing with their mixture rather than against it is the task Soja and Bhabha set.

Thirdspace has been criticised as vague and hard to operationalise, and Soja himself acknowledged that it is more an invitation to look differently than a closed tool. Its value lies precisely there: it reminds planners and designers that the city they draw is always less complex than the city that exists, and that mixtures, porous borders and unforeseen uses are not disorder to be corrected but the very stuff of which urban life is made.