As Chicagoans grapple with the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the radical restrictions which public health requirements have put on the places in which we live, work, and play, it makes sense to step back and ponder some aspects of what makes the situation such an emotional and psychological challenge.
My mantra for analyzing place comes from Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer/philosopher, who wrote: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with values.” Or, to reduce it to a shorthand equation, space plus values equals place. S + V = P.
Right now, our stay-at-home/work-from-home (unless you’re essential) reality obliterates this distinction between First and Second Places. The values of home (solitude, intimacy, relaxation, rest, connecting with loved ones) now must accommodate the contradictory values of work (groups, hierarchies, professional distance, tasks to be completed).
That distinction might function adequately, but it’s much tougher to recreate Third Places: we can Zoom a happy hour drink with friends, but it’s planned and fundamentally different. Any Zoom meeting is a singular conversation: one person talking, the rest listening or waiting to talk. Put six people at the end of a bar, and you might have three different one-on-one conversations running at once, or one four-person conversation, one guy doing the crossword, and a third just staring meditatively into the middle distance. Virtual bars necessarily lack many of the joys of actual Third Places: running into an old pal unexpectedly, or having some random person turn out to be pretty insightful about sports, theater, or politics. Virtual connections along established lines don’t allow for new connections to spontaneously grow.
