When I think about the places where community really happens, my mind does not go first to someone’s living room or office; it goes to the spaces in between. These “in-betweens” are referred to as “third spaces,” the neutral places outside of home and work where people come together naturally.
Coffee shops, parks, churches, community centers, libraries and even the front porch all count. They are the places where you bump into neighbors, overhear new ideas and witness neighborhoods become communities.
Starkville, in many ways, is lucky. Thanks to Mississippi State University, we have more third spaces than most towns our size. On any given day, you can catch up with friends at Dolce, see live music in the Cotton District or bring your kids to an event at the public library.
Campus itself provides a constant stream of events, lectures and sports games that pull people together. These things give Starkville an advantage that most small towns in Mississippi do not have: there are opportunities here for connection baked into the fabric of daily life.
But drive through many other small towns across Mississippi and you will notice a severe lack of community engagement. Without a university or steady flow of students to create demand for gathering spots, many communities simply do not have places where people can spend time together outside of work and home.
Cafes and shops are going out of business, the public libraries have cut back hours and the downtown squares feel more empty than alive. In these towns, opportunities for casual connection are rare, and people grow more isolated without even realizing it.
Part of this problem is about how our towns are physically built. Restrictive zoning laws often separate homes, businesses and public areas so rigidly that it becomes difficult to create natural gathering spots. If housing developments are cut off from retail or restaurants, there is nowhere to walk to, nowhere to linger and nowhere to run into people outside your own bubble.
Layer that on top of our car-centric infrastructure, and there are very few places for natural interactions to take place. Many Mississippi towns are designed around highways and parking lots rather than sidewalks and town squares. Even if a coffee shop or park does exist, you usually have to drive to get there, and once you are inside, the experience is more about efficiency than lingering.
Starkville’s Cotton District is a good example of blended infrastructure: it is walkable, compact and encourages people to drift between shops, restaurants and sidewalks. That flow is what makes third places thrive, and without it, our communities feel more fragmented.
Compare that to a strip mall on the edge of town, where every destination is separated by asphalt, and the only people you meet are the ones parked in the spot next to you. One setup encourages community; the other encourages isolation.
Although physical geography plays a large role in this, there are also many cultural factors that contribute to the problem. Perhaps the biggest being that we live in a society that values work above almost everything else.
Our schedules are dominated by jobs, degrees and productivity. And no, I am not just saying this because I am tired of homework. When “success” is defined almost entirely by what we do for work, third spaces start to look frivolous, like luxuries instead of necessities that are essential to preserving our communities.
Without these spaces, we are drifting further and further into social isolation. We miss out on the small, unplanned interactions with neighbors, friends and strangers that make us feel more connected. We lose the civic energy that comes from neighbors discussing issues on a park bench or at a town hall. We forfeit the personal growth that happens when we share space with people who do not look or think like us.
I am tired of driving through ghost towns as I go home just to feel disconnected from the community I grew up in. There is no way to run into the people I have known since childhood short of going to church, nothing to do except gather at Sonic or in the Walmart parking lot and nowhere to be except at home, sending a text message to an old friend that could have been in person, if only I had the chance to run into them.
