In 2016, Apple made a decision that most retail analysts initially misread as branding. The company began removing the word "store" from its locations — not in small print, not quietly, but as a deliberate and public act of renaming. Apple Union Square became Apple Union Square. Apple The Grove became Apple The Grove. The product on offer, Angela Ahrendts explained at the time, was no longer primarily the device on the table. The store itself had become the biggest product Apple produced.
What followed was not an interior redesign. It was a reconceptualisation of what a commercial space is for. The new format introduced five distinct zones — The Avenue, The Forum, The Genius Grove, The Boardroom, and outdoor plazas with around-the-clock Wi-Fi — none of which were primarily transactional. People could attend live performances with musicians, learn drawing skills from artists, collaborate with entrepreneurs, send their children to filmmaking and coding camps, and go on guided walks with professional photographers. A commercial space had been redesigned as civic infrastructure — a place where membership in the Apple community meant something beyond product ownership.
The company stopped calling it a store because it had stopped being one. And in doing so, it surfaced something that most organisations are only beginning to understand: that in a participatory economy, the space in which a community gathers is not a venue for experience. It is the experience. It is the brand. It is, in the most precise sense, the infrastructure of belonging.
A concept worth recovering
In 1989, the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great Good Place, a book that should have been read far beyond academic circles and never quite was — until the conditions it described became impossible to ignore.
Oldenburg's argument was deceptively simple. Human social life, he observed, depends on three types of place: the home, the workplace, and what he called the third place — the informal gathering space that is neither. He defined it as a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work. Coffeehouses. Libraries. Pubs. Barbershops. Parks. Spaces where people arrive without appointment, where status levels out, where conversation is the primary activity, and where regulars develop the kind of low-intensity but genuine social bonds that hold communities together over time.
Oldenburg's concern was their disappearance — driven by suburban planning, car dependency, zoning policy, and the relentless privatisation of space. His diagnosis was correct. From 2014 to 2019, time spent with friends dropped by 37% in the United States. The pandemic deepened the loss further, and many third places did not survive it.
What no one fully anticipated was the scale of the public health consequences that would follow — or the degree to which that consequence would become a strategic variable for organisations.
The WHO Commission on Social Connection, established in 2023 and releasing its flagship report in June 2025, found that 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, with the condition linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths annually. Loneliness, the Commission found, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, depression, and premature death. At a community level, it undermines social cohesion and costs billions in lost productivity and healthcare.The World Health Assembly responded in May 2025 with the first-ever global resolution on social connection — treating it, formally and for the first time, as a public health priority of equivalent standing to physical and mental health.
This is the context in which organisations are now operating. Whether they choose to acknowledge it or not.
The commercial space as social infrastructure
The NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg extended Oldenburg's framework in his 2018 book Palaces for the People, introducing the concept of social infrastructure — the physical spaces and organisations that shape the way people interact, generating inequalities in health, education, and social networks. Klinenberg's argument was directed primarily at governments and urban planners. But embedded within it was a provocation that applies equally to any organisation that owns or operates a space where people gather: the built environment is not neutral. It either facilitates connection or it obstructs it. There is no design that doesn't choose.
The organisations that have understood this earliest have gained something that no marketing budget can replicate. A community that chooses to gather in your space — not because they have to, not because you've incentivised them to, but because being there means something to them — is a community with a fundamentally different relationship to your organisation than one that transacts with it. The depth of that relationship is the competitive advantage.
Apple understood this. The stores evolved to become showcases of an entire ecosystem, where customers were not just consumers but active contributors to the Apple community. The Today at Apple programme, launched globally across five hundred locations in 2017, converted the retail store from a point of sale into a point of community, systematically deepening brand involvement without requiring a commercial transaction. The business result was not incidental — it was precisely because the space stopped optimising for transaction that transaction performance improved.
This logic is not confined to technology retail. Helsinki's Oodi Library, opened in 2018 and designed explicitly around the third-place principle, offers not just books but free facilities for citizens to socialise, learn, and create — a sewing room, a recording studio, a 3D printing lab, a rooftop terrace. It has been nicknamed the "People's Home," and has welcomed ten million visitors since March 2024. The Seoul Outdoor Library, a series of open-air reading and gathering spaces set across the city's most iconic public locations, welcomed over six million visitors since 2022 and was voted the city's number-one policy by citizens in 2024 for its response to urban isolation.These are not amenity projects. They are social infrastructure investments — and the cities making them are doing so because the evidence that social infrastructure affects economic resilience, public health outcomes, and community cohesion is now too strong to disregard.
The fourth space question
IE Business School researchers, writing in late 2025, identified what they termed the emergence of "fourth spaces" — a concept that extends Oldenburg's third place into the age of participatory, digitally augmented experience. If third places were the social infrastructure of the twentieth century, fourth spaces can be the programmable social layer of the twenty-first — spaces that combine instant, low-friction access with data-informed personalisation that makes the experience feel genuinely relevant to each participant.
The distinction between third and fourth space is not primarily technological. It is architectural. Third places succeeded because they were designed for lingering — for the kind of unhurried, voluntary, repeated presence that builds genuine social bonds. Fourth spaces preserve that quality while adding programmability: the ability to adapt the space, the programming, and the experience to the specific community using it, in real time, based on what that community actually does rather than what an organisation assumes it wants.
This is where the convergence of physical and digital becomes strategically significant — not as a novelty, but as a design capability. The organisations that are building genuinely participatory spaces are using digital tools not to replace the physical experience but to deepen it: to know who comes regularly and why, to programme around the rhythms of the community, to surface the connections between members that would otherwise remain invisible, and to make the space feel — in Oldenburg's precise language — like a home away from home.
Two key features distinguish these spaces: instant, low-friction access that lowers the threshold to join, and data translated — with consent — into knowledge that adapts the experience, making it personal and relevant and sustaining engagement over time.
The critical qualifier is consent. The organisations that will build durable community infrastructure are the ones that treat the data generated within their spaces as a trust relationship, not a surveillance operation. In the participatory economy, communities can distinguish between being known and being tracked. The architecture of the space, and the data governance behind it, communicates which of the two is actually happening.
What this means for organisations that are not in retail or hospitality
The instinct, when reading about Apple's town squares and Helsinki's library, is to treat these as examples from adjacent industries — interesting for context, not directly applicable. That instinct is worth resisting.
Every organisation has spaces. Offices. Showrooms. Event venues. Conference rooms. Headquarters lobbies. Digital platforms. Community forums. Each of these spaces is either designed to facilitate genuine connection between the people who use them — or it is designed around something else: efficiency, transaction, control, aesthetic impression. The design choice, whether made consciously or by default, produces the community, or its absence.
The organisations experiencing the sharpest decline in community cohesion — both internally, in their workforces, and externally, in their customer and partner relationships — are almost always those whose spaces, physical and digital, were designed primarily for transaction or broadcast. They were built to move people through efficiently, or to communicate to them clearly, rather than to create the conditions under which people want to stay, return, and bring others.
The shift required is not large in terms of capital. It is significant in terms of intention. It asks: what would this space look like if it were designed first for connection, and second for everything else? That question, applied to an office layout, a client event, a digital community platform, or a retail environment, produces different answers in every case — but it always produces answers that are more interesting than the default.
Four considerations shape whether an organisation's spaces are functioning as social infrastructure or merely as operational infrastructure.
The first is dwell time. Social infrastructure is characterised by spaces people choose to stay in longer than they need to. Dwell time is the simplest proxy for whether a space is generating genuine community value — and it is measurable, whether in a physical location or a digital environment. Organisations that track footfall and session length but never ask why people leave when they do are missing the most important signal their spaces produce.
The second is regularity. Oldenburg's third place depends on regulars — people who return not because they have to but because the space has become part of their rhythm. The organisations building genuine community infrastructure are the ones designing for the second and fifth and twentieth visit, not just the first. The programme matters as much as the physical design. A space that offers something worth returning to — a recurring event, an evolving exhibition, a community that develops over time — generates regularity. A space that optimises for transaction or first impression generates throughput.
The third is levelling. Oldenburg identified the third place as a space where social status levels out — where the CEO and the analyst, the new client and the longstanding partner, the expert and the learner, occupy the same space on equal terms. Organisations that design their spaces around hierarchy — seating arrangements, access tiers, private rooms for senior visitors — are designing against community formation. The spaces that generate the strongest community bonds are consistently those where the conditions of participation feel genuinely equal.
The fourth is programming. Physical space is necessary but not sufficient. When public places are set up to promote social connection through regularly scheduled gatherings, strangers become familiar faces and networks of friendship and mutual support can bloom. The programme is the activation of the space — and it needs to be designed with the community, not just for it. Organisations that programme their spaces based on what they want to communicate, rather than what their community wants to do together, are running events, not building infrastructure.
The strategic position available to organisations that move first
There is a window. The loneliness data — WHO's landmark report, the US Surgeon General's advisory, the national policy responses now emerging across Europe and Asia — has made social connection a visible and urgent public concern. Research from the Foundation for Social Connection shows how the built environment can either hinder or encourage the meaningful social interactions that determine community resilience. The organisations that respond to this context by redesigning their spaces as genuine community infrastructure will occupy a position that is extremely difficult for competitors to replicate — because it is built on relationships, not features.
The organisations that continue to design their spaces primarily for transaction, efficiency, or broadcast will find that the communities they need — customers who return, employees who commit, partners who trust — are forming elsewhere, around organisations that gave them somewhere worth gathering.
Cultural institutions, city makers, immersive experience designers, architects, sociologists, and technologists can coauthor this programmable social layer — by embedding gatherings around shared experience, choosing accessible hosts, and funding the stewards of these spaces as seriously as the screens within them. That list is conspicuously missing one actor: the commercial organisation. Not because commercial organisations don't belong in it — but because most of them haven't yet recognised that they do.
The ones that do will understand something that Apple grasped a decade ago, that Oldenburg argued three decades before that, and that the WHO has now elevated to a global policy priority: the space where people gather is not a backdrop to the relationship. It is the relationship. Design it accordingly.
Part 5 — The Trust Economy: Why Proof Is the New Persuasion — examines how blockchain-backed verification, radical transparency, and community-authenticated credibility are becoming the foundational layer of trust on which everything in this series — community ownership, participatory brands, co-created media, and connective spaces — ultimately depends.
References
Oldenburg, R. — The Great Good Place, Paragon House, 1989
Klinenberg, E. — Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Crown, 2018
WHO Commission on Social Connection — From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies, World Health Organization, June 2025
IE Business School — From Third to Fourth Spaces: Immersion That Builds Belonging, IE Insights, November 2025
Apple Inc. — Today at Apple programme documentation and Angela Ahrendts, Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, 2016
Project for Public Spaces — Sociability: Public Spaces as an Antidote to Isolation, pps.org
World Cities Culture Forum — How Are Cultural Spaces in Cities Tackling the Loneliness Epidemic?, September 2025
About the author
Sven Jason Willemsen MSc MA is the founder of Aurenox — a strategy executive with 20+ years of experience in brand strategy, cross-border market development and transformation leadership across EU and Mercosur markets. The advisory is grounded in direct operational experience across multiple founder-led ventures