CollaPlay

Trace a typical day's route and you'll notice that most of the time we're moving between destinations.

Home to office, office to the MRT station, the station back home. Work, errands, dinner with friends, or just heading somewhere to rest: almost every trip across the city has a clear purpose, and once it's done, we leave. Still, there are times we want to stray from those routes on purpose. Maybe it's a detour after work to sit in a park pavilion for a while, or a weekend afternoon in a bookstore or cafe with a book. Or maybe you just want somewhere that feels unlike home, and even less like the office.

If all you needed was coffee, a convenience store would do. If all you needed was a desk, you could stay home. Yet people still go looking for places that sit outside their daily routes. So what we're really after probably has little to do with coffee, outlets, or air conditioning.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called these places, set apart from home and work, the "third place." In Ximending, a space called CollaPlay, a playground that could exist, answers that need.

Collaboration + Play = CollaPlay, a Playground That Could Exist?

It may be easiest to think of CollaPlay as a mixed-use building. There's coffee and a coworking area, a recording studio, a bar, an event space, plus workshops and all kinds of community events. On features alone, it can cover a full day for a freelancer, a creator, or even a whole team. What it aims for goes well beyond features, though.

We hope the people who come here can believe that possibilities exist.

The name "a playground that could exist" sounds like an artsy tagline, and it also explains why the space was designed at all. An amusement park exists because it makes people want to walk in with curiosity and a sense of play; the number of rides matters less. CollaPlay exists for a similar reason: to encourage those of us who are now adults to keep exploring who we are and to try out different lives. Along the way, CollaPlay supports you on several fronts.

How Does CollaPlay Support You? Mixed Functions and a Real-World Community

We want to back every idea and action as it takes shape, and help it grow into a community.

The building holds coworking space, a cafe, a bar, a recording studio, and a classroom for talks and performances. At first glance they look like parts assembled into a mixed-use space. Look closer and you'll see they're connected, and all of them are built around creating chances for community and conversation.

Picture a full day. You come in with your laptop in the morning, invite a collaborator over to talk through a project in the afternoon, and join a workshop, talk, or natural wine session in the evening. If inspiration strikes, you might record a podcast episode in the studio, or host your own sharing session in the event space upstairs. The things you've been meaning to do become events that actually happen, and through those exchanges you build your own community bit by bit.

CollaPlay believes a third place with real life in it needs a comfortable setting and, just as much, openings for people to connect. So beyond everyday coworking, it runs Co-working Wednesday, creator meetups, themed workshops, book clubs, and a residency program, steadily bringing together workers, creators, and doers from different fields. Each event is a new meeting point where strangers can start a conversation over a shared interest, a shared belief, or a project in progress.

A Community Base That Is Itself a Growing Community

It's easy to describe CollaPlay as a space that gathers creators, freelancers, and all sorts of community events. What the team cares about more than "running a community," though, is how a community can emerge and keep growing.

Raymond admits he is still working out what community actually means.

I'm still figuring out community myself. And I think it matters a lot when a group of people can come together and create something.

He says this with a laugh. For him, the reason CollaPlay hosts so many events across so many themes and fields is simple: he wants to go to them himself. Art writing, improv, book clubs, creator meetups, podcast recordings, themed gatherings, natural wine talks… proposals and events that used to be scattered across the city all end up happening here.

As Raymond sees it, the biggest value of community goes beyond bringing people together. It opens up a wider range of perspectives. People who come here meet others from different backgrounds. That might lead to a new collaboration, or it might just be a chat and an exchanged point of view, and either can be enough to change how someone imagines their future.

Melissa's view comes more from her own life. Before leaving the corporate world to start a business, she put her energy into an empowerment community focused on creating meaningful work. Looking back, she says what actually helped her step out of her comfort zone was the people around her who believed in the same ideas, more than any course or body of knowledge.

When you choose a path few people have walked, what you need most is often someone who still tells you "You can do this" when you doubt yourself, even more than new skills.

That realization has gradually become the core of how CollaPlay understands community.

That's why CollaPlay puts its energy into the people who come through the door. The hope is that everyone who walks in finds their own partners, maybe even grows a community of their own, then carries what they've built here into their next chapter and wants to come back to share it with more people.

CollaPlay is a place where community happens, and it is also a community that is still growing.

Closing Thoughts

Back to the question at the start: why do we keep deliberately walking into places we have no particular need to be?

The answer probably has little to do with coffee, outlets, or air conditioning. What draws people in is usually the possibilities and ideas that haven't happened yet, tucked away in their minds and their lives. An unexpected conversation, a like-minded partner, an idea that suddenly takes shape: CollaPlay is a playground that sets these chances in motion. People arrive for different reasons and leave with something. Some find partners, some find a method, some find their next direction. And sometimes just spending time here is enough to make you imagine that your life could look a little different.

Perhaps what makes a third place precious has less to do with what it physically provides. When you leave, you notice you're a little different from when you walked in, and you find yourself looking forward to the next turning point.