When Arec Ligon moved to Brownsburg, Indiana, he was frustrated by how few places nearby seemed worth lingering in. That frustration became Linger, a growing map of user-submitted third places across the country. Instead of ranking businesses, the site asks different questions: Is this place welcoming? Can people stay without spending much? Is the walk there actually comfortable? Arec built Linger around contributions from people who know these places firsthand which lets the map capture qualities a search engine usually misses, including the local stories that explain why people keep coming back.
Hello there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and it's a great privilege to connect with Strong Towns members all over who are doing things that are interesting, unique, and actually helping to make a difference in places.
With me today is Arec Ligon, who is building out an amazing website that lets you explore third places where you live or places that you might intend to go and visit. It's called Linger, and if you head to Linger Community, you'll be able to explore this amazing and growing collection of user-submitted third places. Arec, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thanks, Norm. I'm so excited to be on your podcast today.
Thank you. It's awesome to see what you are doing. Share more about the genesis of the Linger project and how it's coming together, and then we'll talk about ways that people can use it.
Yeah, that's a great place to start. I would introduce myself as a Midwest suburbanite who very recently realized there is not a whole lot to do near my house. It's about a mile to the nearest place worth hanging out in, which is a car ride.
It's about half an hour into the city, where things are happening more often, by car. I have been searching for live music for the longest time. I moved here in 2021 to a small town called Brownsburg, 2,500 people, and you'd think we would have at least some kinds of shows, but it's sparse. That was the first thing that got me on this topic.
In speaking with other people and trading experiences, it turns out that lots of people in suburbia feel that way. The idea snowballed from there.
I can see the map of third places, and it's coast to coast in the continental U.S. right now. Can you describe it for folks who are listening?
Sure. We recently hit a milestone. I hope we have another by the time you're listening to this. We crossed 300 places, and I've added maybe 20 or so. Most of those places are user-contributed.
The reason I like to do it that way, rather than scripting or automating it, is that people know places better than I do. We actually go very deep on the data that we're collecting about these places. There are a lot of attributes and a lot of unique things, culturally and geographically, that make a place a place. It also varies greatly what people are looking for when they want to go find a place.
You're looking at things like food and drink options in a community, the arts, outdoor shops and services, community spaces, and entertainment. Yes, please. I want all of that.
Another feature I saw that you're doing is creating mini tours. I thought that was such a cool experience: if you're coming to my community, what would it look like from sunup to sundown? What would a day look like in the life of a visitor? That can be one of those things where you realize the tour that we roll out for people who come join us in our places is often better than anything we've ever done up until that point.
I've had that with my family. They would come out to Southern California when we lived there, and we got up to some really cool things that we otherwise maybe wouldn't have. Do you want to touch on why that's important, and why getting to know and love your own community can sometimes be about finding those hidden gems that somebody alerts you to? You realize, whoa, I've been living under a rock. I didn't realize that there was a third place. I might have bemoaned its absence, but actually they do exist, and there are places for us to gather, help each other, and connect together.
Absolutely. You're touching on the critical point for why I think this project is viable, which is that strong towns and great cities are more than what you can find on your preferred search engine. You can easily get a top 10 list, and that list is going to be based a lot on commercial interests, whereas third places are operating in a different space.
We want our third places to be on the lower end of the financial requirement spectrum. We want to be able to hang out there for longer rather than turning over a restaurant table. We want things like community services and amenities: mobile printing at libraries, tax help at libraries, parks where it's okay to walk your dog if you live in an apartment, as long as you clean up after it. Where can we do these things? It does capture that full spectrum of variety that people might be looking for.
Can you talk a little bit about how these things are showing up on the map? Like you said, there are several hundred submissions and counting. That is a labor of love, but also of discovery. How would people go about adding their own contributions?
Yeah. Like good third places, Linger is free to use. I imagine almost all of my users will be free users. There's a premium model for folks who want that, but free users can add places, and you'll go through a questionnaire. I've gotten great feedback that it's user-friendly, so I'm happy to report that. It's always nice to get those compliments.
I've collected probably 80 or 90 different facets of what a place could be: what kind of place it is and what amenities it has. That's where that three-minute scroll through all of the options captures those details and puts them in one centralized place.
Some of these things aren't very Googleable. How generally noisy is it at a place? Is it a comfortable walk? There's a sidewalk and it's near a bus stop, but is that a comfortable walk? We're collecting that data from the people who know it very well and care enough about places to share them with other people, promoting 'third-place-iness,' as I like to call it.
I don't want to presume that we all think about third places all the time. Can you offer your working definition of a good third place, or even any third place for that matter? What's a third place, and why does it matter?
There are three aspects that I index on. The first I've talked about, which is financial obligation. We want that to be lower rather than higher, and none of these are going to be yes-or-no, red-light-or-green-light type things. It's all a spectrum.
The second one is how welcoming it is. If you are new to a community because you are traveling there or you've moved there, that's important. The other demographic I like to point out is people who have entered a new stage of life in the same community, where they're looking for a different mix of places based on a new life change: having kids, their kids leaving the house, or retiring.
The third axis is inclusiveness, and it's a little different from being welcome. Folks who have different levels of ableness, folks who look, sound, or smell different than you do - are they included in that space?
I like to talk about my buddy. He's Guatemalan, and we've been friends for more than half my life. I am very comfortable going to a place that is predominantly Hispanic. I've grown up with his family, speaking Spanish, eating their food, and listening to their music, and I would feel welcome in a Hispanic-geared place because I'm comfortable with it.
One of the things that I noticed on the website are two L's that stood out to me. One is the name of your project, Linger. Let's start with that, and then we'll go to lore, which is one where I thought, whoa, I want to learn more about that as well.
Let's talk first about Linger. That seems like a loaded term in a really beautiful and important way. Can you talk about that?
Yes. I spent a lot of time workshopping different names and landed on Linger. Obviously, we have the nice callback to the Cranberries, and Dolores O'Riordan was an amazing talent. I'm still sad that we have lost her.
Being able to linger in a place and being comfortable doing that is the other word that gets paired with it to make it a real third place. I imagine your listeners will vibe pretty well with the word linger.
Yeah, because it's interesting. It's not just gather, because gather sometimes suggests that it has to be with a group. Sometimes you wonder: gather for what? Gather for how long? Am I allowed to gather in a sustained way? Linger has that real sense of come stay a while, come without an agenda, or come with your purpose already in mind. Come and hang out with other people, but maybe not. I love that there's that breadth available.
Then you have a second L, which is lore, and you have a feature on the site where people can add the narrative or the story of a place. Share more about that, because to me that's another key element of noticing and observing what's going on in our communities, but also passing those things along.
Yeah. I have some features on the site. Lore is one of them that hasn't been utilized much, but I set them up just to see what people will do with them. The way I envisioned it, a good way to introduce someone to a place is to tell someone a story about it: here's something that happened one time, or here's what you need to know about the local character who will always be at the place that you're thinking about visiting. You're going to be a newcomer, you're going to meet them, and we love them. Here's why.
I recently had a conversation with a marketing specialist in Denver who clued me in on developers telling their story when they are building new places or redeveloping places. What were the design choices that went in? What was the collaboration with a local artist? What kind of input did we get from the community that led to some of the infrastructure choices around the place?
That's what he thought of when he thought of lore: being able to tell those kinds of stories as well. That ties in so nicely to promoting the type of behavior that makes places better. I thought it was a really nice observation.
Yeah, I love that. It certainly is the things that we wouldn't fit on the plaque. There's that recommendation, 'Always read the plaque,' and I love that from Roman Mars and the 99% Invisible world. But there's a layer where there's more to what we could observe in our places than just what fits on the plaque.
You've got a way of documenting that, passing it along, and alerting people to it. I think there's something fantastic about that, and I hope it will yield really good fruit.
As we pivot into this project and the work that you're doing, and ways for people to go and figure out how they might use it at Linger Community, do you have any tips or suggestions for people who are kind of techy or interested in building tools?
I'm an open book, and I've got a bizarre name, so it's very easy to find me on LinkedIn and connect if you have questions about building things.
The general advice I would give is to put yourself in the shoes of the user as much as possible and do a lot of iterating around what you think they might want in a moment, and then also what that journey looks like. I call it 'complete the loop.'
I want people to find my site, use it to find a place, go visit that place, and then I want them to come back. But I do want them to get off of their phone. This is not an attention-grabbing device. We have enough of that.
I do need them to come back, and I need them to feel that sense of contributing and maintaining the online community part of it, recognizing the ecosystem that's operating in: the compounding effect of putting the information out there, letting people find it, and then they add more to it. It grows and gets better over time.
It really captures some of the best spirit of what the internet is supposed to bring to us, and what it should yield as good fruit for our places and our communities. As we close, I'd love to hear: what is it that gives you hope in your place?
Oh, wow. Starting this project has introduced me to a lot of incredible people who are doing very exciting work. I got the opportunity to go to Detroit for Placemaking Week about a month ago. I met a lot of amazing people and learned a lot about the industry and how we make things work. How do we transition away from the 1950s structure that we have inherited?
Then, seeing the real-world examples of things getting done. There's so much online where we can identify things that are wrong and broken. We have loneliness. We have the decline of dating. We have political polarization, hypercommercialization. We have all of these problems, and there are a lot of people, in your network and locally, who are doing things to move the needle on that.
Yeah, and hopefully getting together at times and just lingering together in a place. Arec Ligon is with Linger Community, a fantastic resource. Go and check it out, especially if you're in Indiana. They are the pacesetters in terms of having a lot of documentation of great third places within the state and within various communities, including Indianapolis in particular.
I definitely recommend going to take a look and explore, and then ask: what is it about my place that I love that I would definitely want to pass on to somebody? If they were planning the perfect first date, do you have a suggestion of what stops would be on the way? What about walking out with a three-year-old or bringing your grandfather along?
All of those things create opportunities for us to say we want to be able to linger together, as well as sometimes alone, and discover more of the things that bring us delight and satisfaction in our places. That feels very Bottom-Up Revolution to me. I'm so glad that you've joined us today for Bottom Up Shorts, Arec. Really appreciate you. Where can people learn more beyond reaching out on LinkedIn or visiting your website? Is there any other place you want us to check out?
Thanks, Norm. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Folks who want to learn more can find me on Instagram at Linger HQ.
Okay, Linger HQ on Instagram as well. That's awesome. With that, we're going to close out. I hope that maybe today you can go out and find a place and think, 'Huh, this is meant for me, so that I can linger here, spend a little while, and just feel appreciation for the place that you call home.' With that, take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at StrongTowns.org/membership.