Third Places’ Counter-Practices: Understanding Shifting Boundaries Between Private and Public Space in Urban China

Rapid urbanisation in contemporary China has intensified pressures on private living environments, prompting domestic practices to increasingly unfold within third places, specifically privately owned commercial interiors. A representative example is the Starbucks coffeehouse, which explicitly positions itself as a “third place” through its “home away from home” model. This study examines how activities traditionally associated with the private home are enacted within the interiors of Starbucks China. Adopting a qualitative single-case design with two embedded subcases, a campus store and a community store, this research draws on ethnographic observations and interviews. Guided by Baudrillard’s hyperreality and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage framework, it analyses the deployment and reception of commercial assemblages with spatial configurations, interaction routines, and expressive means that are conceived as substitutes for the social and emotional functions of the home. Findings show that Starbucks’ standardised design and service elements establish homelike conditions that effectively dissipate the intrinsic public/private contradiction of these spaces; yet they concurrently foster relevant everyday counter-practices that transcend such contradictions. These contestational practices offer compensatory comfort, caregiving, and social encounter for those lacking adequate private space. The study argues that such third places reveal critical shifts in the use of public space, offering insights into the changing nature, lived experience, and governance implications of public space in contemporary cities.