Apologies for double-posting this one. The Substack “cross-posting” tool is handy if one pays attention to each step. Clearly, I should stop resenting those “Are you sure you want to do this?” messages.

I’ve just received a copy of this interview about third places recorded last September for the WRLDCTY conference in Bilboa, Spain. While I found it a bit disconcerting to do an interview with a busy beach behind us, and even more disconcerting to have Canadian geese wandering around, the conversation hit on quite a number of important points. I was happy to find that I’d explained how reading Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place in 1990 changed my life. It was a book that changed a lot of people’s lives, I suspect, and perhaps mine as much as anyone’s since I’ve ended up inheriting the work from Ray. I often find myself wishing I could talk to him about the new material, but so far I’ve never found myself agonizing over whether he would agree with me—in fact, I have a sense that he is urging me on.

The Substack platform now uses AI to generate video clips—after all where would a writer be without video clips to post to Facebook and YouTube? Here’s the bit about how third places changed my life (just a minute and a half).

The interviewer, Steven Pedigo, is director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas Austin, and happens to have a home in Great Barrington. How fortunate I was to have such a knowledgeable interlocutor. He asked great questions, and encouraged me to include practical advice to people wanting to create or restore a third place. That section of the book is now substantial. I’m gathering a lot of material that won’t fit into the book but will become lectures or perhaps even a course. I’m keen to field test ideas, and will be looking for case studies as I travel in 2026. Europe first, and then Mexico.

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