Back in the 1980s, sociologist Ray Oldenburg defined the third place as a space in the community where people spent time, outside of their homes or work. This space could be your local park, bowling alley or church.

In the decades since Oldenburg coined the term though, many of those in-real-life third places have either been replaced by online communities or nixed in favour of more commercialized gathering places.

Nathan Allebach is a creative director based just outside Philadelphia, and for the last few months he's been making hugely popular TikTok videos that help break down the reasons why we're losing so many of these precious community hubs, particularly in bigger cities.

He talked to Tapestry's Mary Hynes about how urban planning, policy decisions and human nature all come together to determine just how much human connection we are able to get as we go about our daily lives. Here's part of their conversation.

I believe it was three or four years ago, one of my co-workers brought up Ray Oldenburg's book, The Great Good Place. It just gave me language for a concept that all of us are familiar with, in some sense. And once I had that language, it was like, "Man, this is the greatest secret that no one that I had spoken with prior had really conceptualized for me." I thought it was just a really useful way of thinking about social institutions.

I think it's places that don't apply too much pressure to purchase something, where you can just hang out and be. So that might include a cafe, a barber shop, someplace that has a minimum barrier to entry, but also this sense that people are welcome to hang out there for longer periods of time and not necessarily be rushed out the door.

I think it's a place where people want to be, and can spend longer periods of time communing with one another.

There's a lot of different context for this. If we look at it through a racial lens, [in] the civil rights era you have a lot of issues where Black communities had public pools that were literally filled with concrete, because there were white communities that did not want these public spaces to be filled with minorities. So you have more institutionalized forms of trying to curb these social institutions [like that], and then you have the more broad, long-term systemic effects [of] zoning.

I think you started to see a lot of [those social institutions] slowly die out through the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s.

Actually, I met my wife at a third place. We met at this coffee shop that's been around for about 30 years, a local coffee shop in a neighbouring town. I used to host an open mic there every Thursday night, and she was one of the baristas there. That's where I spent the better part of my childhood, and it was just this really amazing small business that had a really funky, unique vibe to it, and attracted all the strangest folks that would come to this open mic.

People would come in and read stories and play songs, they would act, lip sync, do comedy routines.

There's a lot of urbanists over the years who have spent time on what are otherwise referred to as chance encounters.

There's something magical about when you're out, and you're just running into somebody, whether it's somebody that you might know, or a complete stranger. There's something about that organic social interaction, that really gives people a sense of delight and a sense of meaning that you otherwise aren't used to getting in the hustle and bustle that our culture has become oriented around.

That's the glue to social cohesion, right? In the age of social media, there's this sort of cold detachment that we all feel when we're interacting with people online. It's like there's no human context other than the words on your screen. People get really angry really easily, [and] we lose the sense of humanity that we would feel if we were in person speaking to them or listening to them. And I think when you have those daily interactions with different people, it reminds you and reinforces what it means to be human and to have relationships with different people.