Green spaces are important third places, or sites where communities gather outside the home and workplace. This Honors course explores their importance.
Photo by Ryan S. Brandenberg
In the much-beloved NBC show Parks and Recreation, protagonist Leslie Knope’s central struggle is turning a dilapidated lot into a lush public park. For students in Honors course COMC 3900 Special Topics: Green Spaces and the Third Place, creating parks where vacant lots once stood is less of a dream and much closer to reality.
“I wanted to offer students a course that gives them a practical understanding of what it takes to create and sustain these spaces—from design and planning to community engagement and funding,” explained Assistant Professor of Instruction Olivia Cohen, who taught the course during the spring semester. “These are skills that can empower them to become long-term stewards in their own communities.”
Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenberg, “third places” are defined as sites of community outside the home and workplace —places like parks and community gardens. When William Penn designed Philadelphia, he ensured that square parks were a part of his grid design so the city would have built-in places for people to gather and exchange ideas. This Special Topics course is designed to cross-pollinate those ideas.
Hands-on experiences embedded within the course involved frequent park visits and cleanups. For their final, students completed a group project drawing up a proposal to revitalize an existing green space in the city.
“Rooting the course in Philadelphia allows students to see the range of green spaces that can exist in an urban environment and to engage with the material beyond a traditional classroom setting,” Cohen said. “Focusing specifically on North Philadelphia for their final projects—a vacant lot revitalization proposal—both aligns with Temple’s mission to serve the local community and addresses inequities in access to green space across the city. Even a single vacant lot transformation can have a meaningful positive impact on a neighborhood.”
Students chose actual vacant lots near campus for their proposals and created realistic budgets needed to convert them. They planned events, gardens, murals and various other forms of community engagement that could be applied to the real world. They even researched grants and other methods of funding to make these proposals as real as possible.
“Creating ‘third spaces’ helps foster connections, and green spaces in particular are especially powerful because they are accessible and support not only social well-being, but also mental and physical health and environmental resilience,” Cohen said. “As we face increasing levels of societal isolation, fragmentation and overwhelm, engaging with our communities and connecting with our neighbors is more important than ever.”
Angelina Soedjartanto, a senior psychology major from Lansdale, Pennsylvania, says she found out about the idea of “third spaces” through social media, and has wanted to learn more ever since. As she begins to think about her post-grad plans, she says that everything she learned about inclusivity in this course will likely stay with her.
“I have really enjoyed a lot of the lessons around community—how it’s important to include people from all backgrounds and create spaces that keep different populations in mind.”
Lourdes Cardamone, a senior political science major and criminal justice minor from Thornton, Colorado, says she felt that the experiential aspects of the course were important because of its content; because the course is community-based, she said it felt right that their methods of learning were too.
“We’re encouraged to connect with our community and with each other; it’s not just traditional learning from a textbook,” she said. “When you’re learning about community, it’s really important to engage with that community. It’s really something special.”