Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade Premium

Explore the concept of Thirdspace in urban environments, where lived experiences shape space beyond physical and imagined dimensions.

Have you noticed how in cities, we see places like Chinatown, Afghan Street, or Bengali corners? These are not the official names of those places, but the moment you enter them, you notice how different they are from the formal city around them. They are culturally vibrant and largely built by and for communities that don’t belong to the region or country where the city exists. Such spaces, rich with life and meaning but unaccounted for in maps, are best understood through the concept of Thirdspace.

Thirdspace tells us that space is not just something we live in; it’s something that lives in us. Shaped by emotion, identity, power, and resistance, it urges us to see how places such as street corners or protest sites are far more than physical locations. They are lived, remembered, and reimagined.

This concept was introduced by Edward Soja in his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), which builds on the influential work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974). Soja expands Lefebvre’s idea of spatial triad into what he calls the trialectics of spatiality — a way of seeing space through three interrelated dimensions: Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace.

A city can be measured by its buildings or population density. That’s one kind of spatial understanding. But if you think about who planned the city, where certain communities live, and how zoning laws shape who belongs where, you’re entering another kind of understanding. Finally, if you ask people how they live, remember, or resist in those places, you will have, yet again, a different understanding of space.

Firstspace (the perceived physical space) refers to the material space we can touch, measure, and map. It includes roads, buildings, parks, rivers, and railway tracks; everything you can record with data. While it seems neutral or objective, it is anything but. The physical placement of slums at city margins or the clustering of communities by religion or caste reflects histories of power and inequality. Firstspace is the focus of statistics, maps, and urban planning. And while it tells us what is there, it doesn’t always explain why or for whom it was built.

Secondspace (the conceived ideological space) is how space is imagined and controlled by those with power, including urban planners, governments, and developers. This space is created in blueprints, master plans, zoning laws, and design philosophies. It reflects ideological visions about what space should be. For example, a city plan may declare a neighbourhood as a “commercial zone” or mark certain areas as “unsafe.” These decisions are not just technical, they reflect values, biases, and priorities. Colonial maps, gentrification projects, and housing segregation are all examples of Secondspace at work.

Thirdspace (the lived and experienced space) is where people actually live, remember, resist, and build meaning. It blends the physical (Firstspace) and the imagined (Secondspace) and goes beyond them. It’s not something you can fully map or plan. Think of a government-assigned refugee colony, perhaps originally called First Main Street, where Afghan migrants live. It was not designed to be anything more than a housing zone. But over time, it transforms into a cultural hub — for instance, a street market during Eid, a place of music, food, and memory. The community itself brings meaning to the place and transforms it. That transformation, that layering of emotion, identity, and politics, is Thirdspace.