Do you have a place where you can relax and hang out that isn’t your home or your work? Now imagine you’re a teenager, particularly one in a low-income or quickly gentrifying area. With these stipulations, that “third place” (a term coined by U.S. sociologist Ray Oldenburg) becomes harder and harder to find.
A person’s “first place” is their home, a private domestic space. A “second place” is a structured social experience where you likely spend most of your time, such as work for adults, or school for kids and teens. Your third place is somewhere you can connect with others, share your thoughts and dreams and have fun. For teenagers, this is a vitally important space to develop social skills and discover who you are outside of home and school.
But where can teens go when there is no place to play?
Lyndsey Deaton, licensed architect, professor and researcher at Clemson University, set out to answer that question by conducting five years of research with more than 50 teens from seven communities in India and the Philippines. She collaborated with a group of students in various majors at Clemson to present those findings in an art exhibition, No Place to Play, which is on view until Sept. 9 at Redux Contemporary Art Center.
Walking through the exhibition, viewers see photographs taken by the teens on disposable cameras over those five years, plus maps, transcripts of recorded conversations and other visual aids which present Deaton’s findings.
“We hope to bring awareness to the importance of safe, comfortable and convenient public space for teenagers, especially those who live in lower-income communities at risk of gentrification,” she said.
The exhibition was created as the final project for a class which Deaton led, through a program at Clemson called creative inquiry, which invited students from a variety of majors including architecture, psychology, women’s leadership and sociology to create this exhibition.
“We focused in the class on understanding what research can do within architecture and design but also how you can curate an exhibition to present those findings to the public,” she said. “The students broke into teams and each developed different ideas of how we would show the material.”
The exhibition also asks the audience to consider the similarities between the teens’ experiences in this study and the urban public spaces around South Carolina.
“The Charlotte-Atlanta corridor is one of the fastest growing areas in the United States,” Deaton said. “So it’s very ripe for economic development impacts. And the students were really interested in figuring out how to apply the lessons we learned from my research in India and the Philippines to South Carolina — so many of them have grown up in these areas. I have two students that are from Charleston, and so they were like, ‘I know exactly where we used to hang out. Let me show you.’ And the same for Greenville.”
The class broke into teams of students, each taking on a city in South Carolina: Clemson, Greenville, where the exhibition premiered in April, Charleston and Columbia.
The students took a general survey of which spaces were hangout places and tied that information together with data from local research institutions studying gentrification and displacement.
The artworks displayed at Redux incorporate the city of Charleston’s geographic information systems (GIS) mapping and racial disparities data to depict how displacement affects the city, one of the fastest-gentrifying areas in the U.S.
Deaton found through her research that the space kids had access to was greatly impacted by not only income disparities but also gender.
“In working and talking with these teens, it became super clear that the girls across all seven communities in two countries had a very limited spatial range. Their spatial mobility was about a third of the boys, which was significant.”
This is visible in the exhibition — through maps, photographs and conversations, it becomes clear that the “third place” is much harder for girls to access, especially when cultural programming like gender roles come into play.
When Deaton gave the teens disposable cameras, she said, across the board, none of the girls could finish taking pictures.
“At first I thought, maybe they’re timid. And basically they told me, ‘No, we just don’t have anything to photograph. We’re just in the house.’
“There’s really a clear lack of space that they can go to, which is going to impact later on in their lives, in what opportunities they see available to them, kind of what their perspective of life is.”
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