THE URBAN ROOM

Live Works, Sheffield, UK

What is an Urban Room?

An Urban Room is a flexible concept—it’s a community and event space situated at sidewalk level that allows citizens to debate, explore, and create ideas about the future of their neighborhood and their city. An Urban Room can host events and neighborhood meetings; it can display exhibitions; it can be a space of study and reflection and art-making or simply a place for hanging out. An Urban Room is a civic space to bring a community together and tell the story of where people live.

Make-It Springfield, Springfield, MA

What is a third place?

A “third place” is a free place to gather that is neither home nor work. For as long as there have been cities, communities have utilized third places like parks, barbershops, libraries, coffee houses, churches, docks, and markets to nurture the social fabric. This is where you catch up on local news, debate ideas, and make new connections. In many ways, the strength of city relies upon the accessibility of its third places.

Urban Rooms are third places dedicated to thinking about how we take care of our urban collectives. Patricia Mou, co-founder of The Commons, calls these “communities for mean-making” or “fourth places.”

Perhaps the most comprehensive example of an Urban Room is the Urban Rooms Network in the U.K.—a loose affiliation of a couple of dozen spaces across the country. These range from the multi-million dollar Farrell Centre in Newcastle to modest rooms with nothing more than a bulletin board, a table, and a couch. The key to all these places is how you activate them.

The Urban Rooms Network is founded upon four principles:

1. A focus on our shared built environment - streets, neighborhoods and public spaces.

2. An open door - where all are welcome, especially those who are traditionally under-represented in decision making about the future of our towns and cities.

3. Exploration through creative activities - to prompt curiosity and fresh thinking.

4. To be “on-site,” that is, located in the places that are being discussed, accessible at sidewalk-level.

How do you open an Urban Room in your community?

The first step is to engage with your community and figure out what kind of space they would like to see. Some communities are missing a safe space just to be, some communities are hungry for talks, events, panels. Some places want a community museum. Opening the dialogue and feedback loops early also allows for the community to take ownership of the space and make it their own.

CultureHouse has a terrific handout that guides you through some of this pre-opening engagement work as well as the ongoing quantitative and qualitative data collection you can do once your urban room opens to help you answer the questions, “What is this space offering our community?” and “Who is this space serving?”

An Urban Room can also start as a short-term pop up space that occupies a formerly dormant storefront. The Urban Rooms Network also offers this helpful toolkit.

Pre-opening engagement and data collection at CultureHouse Peabody.

A key step in opening an Urban Room is to assemble the partners who will help run and activate the space. This team of partners will help to put on events, may assist with staffing, will get the word out and vouch for the Urban Room as a meaningful addition to the community. An Urban Room is only as strong as the partnership behind it.

Often the first year of an Urban Room can be a big learning experience—everyone is still figuring out their role. The community is trying to figure out what the Urban Room is and how they can use it. But if the room carries on past the pop-up stage, a sustainable arrangement for funding, management, and programming will need to be established.

Creating a sustainable business plan for these rooms past year one can be a challenge. Several of the Urban Rooms in the U.K. have affiliated themselves with a university. Linking a space to a larger umbrella institution can lend stability and produce many co-benefits, but can also create new challenges.

It’s important to remember that an Urban Room’s journey is part of the room’s story. Its challenges and triumphs are often collective. As you open and run your room, document the process and keep this transparent and public. An Urban Room is a civic experiment that continues to teach us who about who we are and where we live.