![[1723353956039 1.jpeg]] teishoku is a pretty good metaphor for urban planning. teishoku, meaning 'set meal', was inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2013 as 'the traditional food culture of the Japanese people'. these meals typically consist of rice, a main dish, side dishes, and soup. i found a [paper](https://isocarp.org/app/uploads/2022/11/ISOCARP_2022_Mekata_ISO313-1.pdf) that takes teishoku as a metaphor and maps it nicely onto the 3 types of places in urban environments: the home (first place), the workplace/school (second place), and community space separate from the first two (third place). in cities, rice is like the first place. just as rice is the foundation of a teishoku meal, the home is the bedrock of our daily lives. the main dish is the second place; whether it be fish or chicken katsu, it's the centerpiece of the meal. similarly, work or school are usually the main focus of our daily activities, where we go and be productive humans. then come the soup (typically miso) and side dishes (typically pickled vegetables, 漬物) which make teishoku renowned globally as a longevity food. they bring the variety, flavour, and nutritional balance; you take bites of them in between the staple & main dish as pauses to refresh your palette. in urban planning, third places (cafes, parks, public baths, pubs, gyms, libraries, etc) serve this role. as ‘informal public gathering places’, they are places of refuge, where people can eat, drink, converse, relax, and generally commune in order to develop a sense of belonging to a place. they are hubs where, in theory, community is most alive and people are most themselves. i contest that many modern third places do not end up living up to this idealistic criteria (planning to share more about that in coming posts). however, there's no doubt that third places are indispensable to a healthy urban fabric, just as the side dishes are crucial components in teishoku. they serve as essential touchpoints for non-work social interaction, providing spaces where we can gather "inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably" (to use Ray Oldenburg's terms, the scholar who first coined 'third place').