Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade

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.

- Ranga Reddy

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.