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Paris’s success in removing cars from its streets has been more widely praised than its progress in opening up mixed-use spaces. But the city’s enthusiasm for bringing what urbanists call “third places” to life is exactly why I found myself, just hours after voting in the first round of Paris’s municipal elections, dancing in telecoms company Orange’s former offices in Ménilmontant, the “seventh-coolest neighbourhood in the world”..
The building currently housing Print, a new pop-up, offers a breathtaking view of the Eiffel Tower, poised against the sunset – and, for now at least, it is an ephemeral temple to Millennial culture. It’s a five-storey space hosting photography exhibits, a coffee shop, sourdough pizza, two bars, a red-lit and mirror-adorned dance area and a sunset terrace. As well as pizza and fancy coffee, you can buy hoodies and art and design books – but most importantly, Print contains plenty of space where you can just be, without needing to spend a single euro.
That accessibility is, of course, the most important part of a tiers-lieu, or third place. Libraries, youth centres, arts centres, public swimming pools and gymnasiums certainly fit the bill, as do some bars, pubs and cafes – commercial in nature, but with a secondary duty for local communities as a type of public living room. These are places where lingering is encouraged, rather than chased away. At the risk of blaring the obvious, the critical role these spaces play is in facilitating encounters among people who live near each other. The antithesis, if you will, of “Netflix and chill” and ordering in.
We are seeing similar trends across borders and local contexts: third places have been progressively lost and the far right has sprouted up in their absence, capitalising on atomisation, disaffection and a sense of being left behind. In the US, the decline of true third places has been so drastic that (in perhaps typical American fashion) Starbucks – very much a for-profit megachain – publicly claimed that it could fill the void. The UK has lost 37% of its pubs since 1992, depriving rural areas of vital social focal points.
France has experienced much of the same, with 18,000 bars-tabac closing their doors from 2002 to 2022, taking the“public living room” with them and, as one study found, contributing to an increase in vote share for the National Rally (RN) in the (largely rural) areas left behind by their closures. In the first round of France’s municipal elections, the RN made further inroads; but it also performed less well than feared in key cities such as Marseille, Lyon and Paris, all of which were retained by the left in Sunday’s second round of municipal elections.
In Paris, in particular, voters showed their support for the direction Anne Hidalgo set for the city by pushing her successor, Emmanuel Grégoire, past rightwing challenger Rachida Dati (despite every far-right and centrist mayoral candidate pulling out to support her while the far-left La France Insoumise candidate refused to do the same on behalf of Grégoire).
In this context of declining third places, a single space like Print would be a lucky strike for any city. In Paris, the sheer prevalence and recurrence of third places across time and arrondissements is no accident, but evidence of deliberate political infrastructure – the kind that forms a bulwark against the isolation and disconnection that fuels far-right grievance politics.
Ten years ago, when I lived in the otherwise calm and residential 14th arrondissement, the most prominent third place was Les Grands Voisins, a multi-year occupation of an old hospital complex that the city was planning to redevelop into an eco-neighbourhood. In the meantime, the space was turned over to a mix of nonprofits led by Yes We Camp, which filled the buildings and courtyards with an eclectic mix of artist studios, startups, emergency housing for homeless people and refugees, a cafe and bar marked by long communal tables, conference spaces, community yoga, chickens, concerts and a makeshift outdoor sauna.
Ever since I first encountered Les Grands Voisins, Paris’s third places have drawn me in, primarily for the combination of casualness and warmth that you find in each of them: nobody will ever insist you buy anything at all, no matter how long you stay for. Where other cities have forfeited the existence of third spaces to commerce, Paris has actively facilitated their existence, with the help of nonprofit groups. In doing so it has made a statement as politically radical as any purported “war on cars”. There is a right to simply be that is not conditional on one’s ability to spend.
And being means more than commuting or laying one’s head down for the night. Libraries are timeless and irreplaceable, but there is a need as well for third spaces that encourage whimsy, quirkiness and exuberance – places where you can just be loud. For a time, there was La Guinguette de la Javel, a circle of food trucks on the banks of the Seine where you could swap an ID card for free access to a costume closet. And when La Javel moved (to Bercy Beaucoup, where it is now centred around an urban farm), I quickly found my way instead to Ground Control, a similar type of space originally located in an old SNCF railway depot and then a warehouse next to Gare de Lyon.
And then there’s La Cité Fertile, an expansive warehouse and gardens just beyond Paris’s periphery highway, where a young, unapologetically “woke” new media collective called Histoires Crépues found physical space to welcome hundreds of people for a series of conferences on how to talk about race, identity and postcolonial history. There are smaller spaces too, like the cluster of concessions that have transformed the former stations of Paris’s defunct circular railway line into cafés solidaires (community cafes) and arts spaces. There is even a 7/7 avant garde jazz club filled with Persian rugs and where every concert is pay what you like.
At times, I’ve caught myself wondering whether the somewhat predictably boho-eclectic aesthetic of these places means they are really open to all, rather than just serving a specific demographic. But then I realise that someone at La Recyclerie is benefiting from a “suspended meal” (paid for in advance by someone who can afford it, for another who needs it), or that the age demographic is far more varied than I might have predicted, or that the teenagers dancing at le Centquatre have had quite different childhoods than the one I had. Or even my own experience of giving more, or less – depending on the state of my bank account – when the tall man who runs La Gare/Le Gore, and who will unflinchingly shush you if you’re talking while the electro-jazz band is playing, comes around to “pass the hat”.
Among Paris’s progressive political commitments – pedestrianising the banks of the Seine, swapping parking spaces for restaurant terraces and strips of vegetation, closing streets directly in front of schools to car traffic, billions spent on public housing – the effort put into third places is, I think, among the most important. It definitely got – and will continue to get – my vote.
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Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now
