[opportune]

I recommend a visit to Cuba if you can. Parks are used extensively as a third place there. So I think that this is cultural as much as it is anything to do with parks. Cuba and the US have a lot of differences, of course (maybe you could attribute this to the comparatively much poorer state of housing) but nothing is stopping us from doing this per se.

You may also be surprised how central of a third place are some cafes in southern Europe: in rural Spanish, Greek, Italian villages they’ll often have a contingent of pensioners regulars chatting throughout the day. Again, this could just as well happen in the US - even if you argue car culture or whatever, it could happen in NYC or SF, but doesn’t really.

I think actually, we are culturally averse to third places now. There used to be more in the US (saloons were huge before prohibition). I question the extent to which we “need” it given that we’ve gradually shifted towards not having them. Maybe it’s because those needs are met elsewhere. You could argue things like the workplace (as reimagined by tech companies and startups) or Internet are a third place for example