Being together, doing together and going forward together: echoes from France’s cultural third places in times of covid-19

Abstract

In France, as in many other countries, cultural production and management practices are facing numerous transformations. Being understood as experimental; intermediary cultural spaces that redefine the relationship of culture with the public and the local territory, cultural third places provide a vivid example of this changing reality. Before the current health crisis, the social role of these constructs in regard to the local context were made even more visible. On a first level, this article aims to present the uniqueness of those spaces in the French context. Secondly, it describes the preliminary results of an exploratory study analyzing the reactions and adjustments to working dynamics of a number of spaces in the PACA region, in France, during the first months of the pandemic. Finally, we propose further lines of research.