Thesis
Planning for belonging: how third places sustain civic infrastructure & how cities can sustain them
Master of Science (M.S.), Drexel University
Sep 2026
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00011529
Abstract
Third places, the informal gathering spaces where community forms outside of home and work, produce civic goods that cities depend on: belonging, social capital, collective efficacy, and measurable public health outcomes. Yet American planning systems lack a formal category for these spaces, an inventory of where they exist, and a mechanism to register their loss. This thesis asks what specific conditions make a third place work, what happens when those conditions are threatened or destroyed by planning decisions, and what a planning framework capable of protecting them would look like. Drawing on eight semi-structured interviews with practitioners, business owners, and city officials; a community survey of Philadelphia residents; fieldwork; and narrative inquiry grounded in my experience of third places in the Bronx and Bethlehem, this thesis develops a framework of sixteen conditions organized into three clusters: physical conditions that can be designed, social conditions that must be cultivated, and institutional conditions that determine whether the others endure. Two case studies apply the framework: Bethlehem's South Side, where an eighty-year immigrant-built third-place ecology is eroding under development pressure, and Philadelphia's Gallery at Market East, where four decades of accumulated conditions were removed by a $420 million redevelopment whose approval process never registered what was lost. The thesis proposes Planning for Belonging, a four-dimensional policy framework -- Recognition, Protection, Investment, and Co-governance -- that operationalizes the conditions framework as a designation rubric and equips planning systems with the tools to see and protect the spaces where belonging is produced.
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Details
- Title
- Planning for belonging: how third places sustain civic infrastructure & how cities can sustain them
- Creators
- Natalie N. Constante-Naranjo
- Contributors
- Andrew Zitcer (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Master of Science (M.S.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University
- Number of pages
- 114 pages
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Urban Strategy; Architecture, Design, and Urbanism; Drexel University; Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design
- Other Identifier
- 991022201157604721