Tea, performance, and third place: community engaged development insights from Khartoum’s tea ladies

Abstract This article examines the informal tea spaces created by Khartoum’s settat shay (tea ladies) as everyday sites of social and economic sustainability and explores how these practices can inform community engagement elsewhere. Drawing on staged, performative tea gatherings in the American Midwest, the study analyzes how interaction unfolds and how relationships develop over time. Although scholarship on third places highlights their capacity to support informal social interaction, the findings indicate that their mere existence does not guarantee meaningful engagement. Instead, interaction quality depends on relational conditions such as familiarity, repetition, attentiveness, and group size, which are mediated through shared practices – especially preparing and offering tea. These practices structure interaction through pacing, mutual participation, and low-threshold entry points. By positioning informal tea spaces as a form of relational infrastructure, the article extends third place and food-based engagement literatures through a practice-based lens. It contributes to community engagement by shifting the focus from designing spaces for engagement to shaping the conditions that sustain interaction over time, while demonstrating how practices rooted in Sudanese contexts can inform approaches to community engagement elsewhere.