Transitional third places (TLT): SSE organizations for another "to come"!

Expert

Third places for societal transition: what are they?

New, more responsible consumer behaviors, new ways of working (telecommuting), a new relationship with work (the job you have, rather than the job you do), and corporate social responsibility strategies all appear to be changes that have been adopted. But they have not succeeded in combating the entropy of an industrial economy based on standardization and resource depletion. The systemic dysfunctions encountered presuppose the production not only of anti-entropy (Morlat et al. 2020, p.136), but also of negentropy, i.e.: diversification and movement. In this respect, it's not so much the number of third places that's important - over 3,700 by 2024 - as their diversity: third places for food, third places for culture, third places for crafts, third places for agro-ecology, third places for solidarity, and so on. They all represent a socio-economic movement towards a sustainable development model for the localities where they are created and where they evolve. For Stiegler (2020, p.82): "the locality is the place from which emerges an orientation, i.e. a meaning - an end, arising from a part of an experience shared by a community, thus constituting a knowledge, or rather a bundle of knowledges, always already in the process of diffracting towards a diversely open future".

Third places for societal transition: user-friendly structures!

Illich (1973, p.43) refers to "the other possibility: a user-friendly structure". He explains: "a user-friendly society is one that gives man the possibility of exercising the most autonomous and creative action, using tools that are less controllable by others. Productivity is conjugated in terms of having, conviviality in terms of being". Transitional third places appear to be convivial structures that break with the past, because they serve the men and women who work there, and are controlled by them. Transitional third places thus become potential bifurcation points, moving away from the industrial economy model to raise the societal values of citizens according to economic, social and governance potentialities, linking all living beings at the scale of each territory. Let's not forget that: "transition emerges from local citizen initiatives" (Beucher and Mare 2020, p. 386). Solidarity-based third-places are experimenting with the breakthroughs needed for transition, and truly represent a new, more sustainable model of territorial development!

 

Indicative bibliography:

• Beucher S., Mare M., 2020, « Cadre épistémologique de la notion de transition en sciences humaines et en géographie », Bulletin de l’Association des Géographes Français [On line], 97-4/2020, p. 382-394, en ligne le 31 juillet 2021, consulté le 31 décembre 2021. URL : http ://journals.openedition.org/bagf/7554.
• Glémain P., Billaudeau V., 2021, « Les autres lieux de l’entrepreneuriat et du salariat », Revue d’Économie Régionale et Urbaine-RERU, 2021/5 Décembre, p.927-951.
• Glémain P. ? Billaudeau V., 2022, « Les Tiers-Lieux de Transition Sociétale en Région Ouest de la France : Penser un transitio-mètre pour comprendre leurs effets transitionnels au niveau local ». Norois, 2022/3 n° 264-265, p.139-155.
• Illich I., 1973, La convivialité. Paris, Éditions du Seuil.
• Morlat C., Landau O., Sentis Th., Cormerais F., Alombert A., Krzykawski M., 2020, « Économie contributive, processus territoriaux de capacitation et nouvelles modalités comptable », p.127-156, dans Stiegler B. (dir)., 2020, Bifurquer. Paris, Les Liens qui Libèrent-LLL.
• Stiegler B. (dir)., 2020, Bifurquer. Paris, Les Liens qui Libèrent-LLL

Release date: June 2024