Introduction
The year is 2014, the month is June.
I am just a primary school child, standing in front of a cold, lifeless machine, asking it to let me borrow more than 16 books at a time.
(For context, the National Library used to allow you to borrow 16 books instead of the usual 8 during the school holidays, but as an avid reader ever starving for books to read as a child, it was still not enough. I have also been made aware that in 2024, you are allowed to borrow 16 books at once, at all times of the year. Amazing!)
I did not know it then, but my favourite place in the world as a child, the library, was considered a “Third Place”.
In August 1999, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third places” or “great good places” in his book The Great Good Place, which was an insightful study of common spaces, many of which were not extensively contemplated upon prior to his work. In his research, he defined third places to be spaces besides home (a first place) and work (a second place) where people can congregate and converse. Essentially, a third place was a public place that allows people to come together and chit-chat (maybe not always a library) without any explicit goals like living tasks or productivity. Examples of third places include community centres, parks, coffeeshops, void decks, religious buildings, cafes, gyms and so on. While some third places like food and beverage outlets require purchase of merchandise for the individual to be allowed to be seated in the area, more often than not third places have little to no barriers to entry, making them ideal spaces for all members of the community to gather as they wish.
The logic of the uses of space
In Singapore, we are used to spaces being conceptualised and created to serve a specific purpose, such as schools for education, parks for outings, roads for traffic, and museums for exhibitions. Even with the advent of mixed-use facilities like the condominium-mall-library-preschool combinations such as White Sands and Northpoint, the different aspects of the building are demarcated clearly and definitively, with retail space separate from the residential, and education businesses usually situated on higher floors away from the hustle and bustle of shopping. This means that when we navigate different spaces, there is an implicit and unspoken expectation of the type of activity that can, and will, be engaged in each space, and we exert this expectation as individuals and communities to define these spaces as such.
Applying this logic to Tembusu, different parts of a single building seem to belong to different categories of places. Our rooms are first places – a space that belongs exclusively to us as individuals, where we exert the most control over the activities we allow to occur there. We decorate it with posters and personalise our doors, aromatise with diffusers and tidy up with care, we invite our friends over for gatherings, we huddle over our tables to prepare for tests and examinations. Our seminar rooms, then, serve as second places, used for studying, while our level lounges are third places for socialising and leisure.
Tembusu in Limbo
However, Tembusu may also serve as an antithesis to this very logic of the use of spaces. In our College, the categorisation of a space as a first, second, or third place is not clearly distinct as it may first appear. What happens when these concepts of first, second and third places blend into each other and overlap?
Tembusu College primarily serves as a place of accommodation for its residents, but can it truly be considered a “first place”, if home still exists as a house somewhere else, where family members still live and from which one has merely moved away temporarily? The idea of Tembusu, or any on-campus accommodation as a “home away from home”, is often touted as an attractive factor for students applying to live there. However, it also serves to complicate and blur the lines between where, or rather what, home is to the individual.
For me, and presumably for many others as well, while Tembusu is dearly loved and cherished as a place to stay that is away from home, it can never truly replace the position that our family home holds in our hearts. There also lingers the gnawing feeling, when moving back to my neighbourhood for the weekend or vacation, that things are never exactly the same as before I left for university. The room in my house, and the room in Tembusu, both serve to house me for temporary periods of time, with me oscillating between the two places every week and semester. No sooner had I settled in one place than it came time for me to move again. The idea of any space being my first place became more and more obscure. Does the notion of ‘home’ demand singularity, and if I am to consider Tembusu my new first place, does it replace my original ‘home’? There is a certain loss that follows from choosing to be in one place over the other, and I can only imagine this feeling to be amplified and felt in deeper intensity by those away pursuing overseas studies, and those here in Singapore fro distant shores.
Moreover, spaces in Tembusu do not strictly remain defined as a second or a third place, but shift in meanings along with temporal rhythms. Different times of the day call for different uses for the same space. Consider, for instance, our Seminar Rooms. Tembusu is a place for learning and work, with requirements for residents to take part in seminars and courses every semester. To that end, our Seminar Rooms can definitively be said to be a second place – as a space for discussion and work. But do we not interact and spend time with others in these very spaces for leisure and recreation – for instance, for Interest Groups such as Tabletops and IG^2? Then again, it may not be even possible to say that a space can only be a first, second or third place at one time. The very existence of a concept of a Residential College blurs the lines between this categorisation of spaces, to create meaning to the space that is unique to its residents, unstable yet familiar, unfixed yet easily identified.
Implications of being Unclassifiable
If a space can be a first, second and third place all at once, what does that mean for us to exist in that space? Can an individual have more than one first place at any given time? Can Tembusu College even be placed into a single definitive category? The clearest consequence of this unclassifiability would be the sense of “flux” that plagues many individuals of my age. In this phase of life that is so full of opportunity and uncertainty, we are continually trying to find the person we want to become.
The American psychologist Jeffrey Arnett defined this period as “emerging adulthood”, with this stage being features of this time being the “age of instability” and “age of feeling in-between”. In an attempt to resolve this unsettled state, we may choose to apply labels, categorise and classify, create rules and regulations, set up infrastructure and amenities to support our exertion of authority and control over these areas, shaping the environments we find ourselves in. These environments are shaped by (and for) humans, then go on to create and influence important moments of the human experience.
As we develop more ideas and observations about the spaces we inhabit, it may be worthwhile to consider whether there is meaning in a space having multiple functions, especially in a place such as Tembusu College, where first, second and third places all exist in close spatial proximity. Maybe such spaces serve to hold a mirror up to ourselves, in that existing in a space so ambiguous and complex may prompts us to observe our own condition, as beings undergoing rapid change and development, and with all the intricacies, untethered-ness and fluidity that this period of our lives entail.
Perhaps being in the midst of the mess in us trying to clearly label and define our college demands of us to shift our focus away from pinning something this elusive down, and instead appreciate how it parallels our own state in this phase of life, which is defined by flux – growing, changing and evolving. The embrace of this fluidity and incoherence in all its chaos may just be the only certain thing that we can choose to do to define this coming-of-age period, and a rite of passage we must all undertake into adulthood.
Cover image from National University of Singapore (@NUSingapore) on X, Banner image by Min
About the Author:
Min is a year 2 Dentistry student. When not busy catching sleep or preparing for the next test around the corner, he likes to watch video essays on Youtube such as why “insert city” is insanely well-designed.
References:
Emerging adults: The in-between age. (n.d.). Https://Www.Apa.Org. Retrieved 29 September 2024, from https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/emerging
Markiewicz, E. (2020). Third places in the era of virtual communities. Studia Periegetica, 28 (4), 9–21. https://doi.org/10.26349/st.per.0028.01