The kinds that never limit anybody

Five kinds of place in this record contain no limit at all. Not a notice, not an answer, nothing.

places of worship        14
bookshops                13
hotel lobbies            10
transport concourses      9
museums and galleries     8
                         ---
                         54

Fifty-four places, a quarter of the record, where the question of how long somebody may sit has apparently never needed answering. To compare observations across locations, reviewers can explore the official workflow and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

What they have in common

Not their terms at the door. The fifty-four include twenty-seven places that ask nothing, twenty that expect a purchase, and seven behind a fee. A separate perspective on streets, seating and urban observation is available from Planetizen.

Not their size, their ownership or their purpose.

What they share is that sitting is not the point of them. A place of worship is for worship; a bookshop sells books; a concourse moves people; a museum shows things; a hotel lobby receives guests. In none of them is a chair the product, and in none of them has anybody had cause to ration one.

Nowhere in this record limits a chair unless the chair is part of what it sells.

That is the cleanest statement the limit field produces. The thirty-eight places that do limit staying are cafés, pubs, laundrettes, shopping centres, libraries, halls and covered public seating — and in every one of those the seat is either the product or the thing the operator manages a crowd with.

The four that are also silent

Four of these five kinds are among the quietest rooms in the walk.

bookshops              1 of 13 had somebody speak
hotel lobbies          0 of 10
transport concourses   0 of 9
museums and galleries  0 of 8

Forty of those places, and one conversation between strangers in the lot.

A room nobody limits is not a room where anything happens. The permission and the silence go together, and both follow from the same fact: nobody has a stake in what you do there, so nobody stops you and nobody talks to you either.

The fifth, which is the opposite

Places of worship: fourteen places, no limits, and eight of the fourteen had somebody speak to a stranger — fifty-seven per cent, the highest rate of any kind in the record.

So the correlation above is not a law. A place can set no limit because sitting is not its purpose, and still be the most sociable room in the city.

What separates the fourteen from the forty is that they are the only kind in this group with a shared occasion in them. The others are rooms people pass through alone.

The hotel lobbies, which are the strangest

Ten hotel lobbies. Not one sets a limit. Nine of the ten were assumed to.

That is the highest phantom rate of any kind in the record — ninety per cent — and it has a page of its own in the next section.

The combination is worth stating here as well: a room that limits nobody, that eight of ten expect a purchase in, where nobody has ever been told to go, where nine people in ten believe they are on sufferance, and where in the entire walk nobody spoke to a stranger once.

What this does not establish

That these places would never move anybody along. Nothing was tested. A concourse at midnight is not a concourse at noon, and the record contains almost nothing from midnight.

That the five kinds are alike. They share one empty column and differ on everything else.

That limits are a sign of anything bad. Libraries limit; libraries are also among the quietest and most used places in the record. The field counts what is stated and this site attaches no virtue to the count.

The fifty-four against the rest

Half of them are free at the door, more than half have a free chair, and they are less sociable than the rest of the record rather than more.

So the kinds that limit nobody are also, on the whole, the kinds where nothing happens — with the fourteen places of worship as the single large exception, carrying eight of the group's nine conversations.

Strip the places of worship out and the remaining forty places produce one conversation between them.

What that does to the permission argument

It separates two things that are usually joined.

A room can be entirely unrestricted and entirely empty of company. The record contains forty such places — bookshops, hotel lobbies, concourses, museums — and they are among the freest and quietest rooms in the city at once.

Nobody will tell you to go, and nobody will say anything to you either.

Whatever makes a place a third place, not limiting people is not it. Permission is necessary and nothing in this record suggests it is sufficient.

Why fifty-four matters

Because a quarter of the record consists of places where the central question of this site has no answer, and nobody has ever needed one.

That is the condition most of the city is in. The argument about third places is conducted as though permission were scarce and contested. In two hundred and six places it was contested thirty-eight times, and in fifty-four it has never arisen at all.