Co-working as an Urban Overlay

Co-working as Urban Overlay Erin Day and Jian Xie

Co-working as Urban Overlay Erin Day and Jian Xie

Drawing away from traditions of work being embedded in a singular and physical office, co-working is breaking new ground, not by offering free coffee or a casual ambiance, but by offering itself as an alternate system of essential services positioned within a greater system of infrastructure.

Companies such as WeWork operate as providers of curated services that adapt to new flexible modes of work and networking. While WeWork is essentially offering real estate services, the real product that they sell is access to a robust network of services tailored towards a holistic life experience, rather than simply offering desk space.

Work retreat company Remote Year expands the notion of co-working across the globe by providing a nomadic work lifestyle. Participants work remotely at their normal job, moving to a new location each month. The company coordinates accommodations, 24-hour access to workspace, and cultural programming to provide an integrated work-live travel experience, satisfying a broad spectrum of human needs and desires. These types of companies begin to take on a wider role in providing essential services to their clients through a managerial process, as well as developing a robust system of physical infrastructure. This forms an overlay onto the existing city, strategically targeting and augmenting existing networks.

WeWork in particular, gains appeal in large part due to their flexibility and adaptability to workers on the go. The myriad

55 of locations is not simply an issue of localized supply and demand but an intentional creation of a network that offers its members access to space and services anywhere they may be. WeWork has expanded this ethos to create systems of supportive infrastructure, including housing, education, and co-working. These services are connected and curated under a robust managerial team, as well as a wider branding strategy that links these diverse services into a single product. As these companies expand and begin to offer services typically provided by the government, these networks become a product as well as a system of layered infrastructure that allows its users to have access to essential services. Through providing access to an immersive network of physical services, an inversion of the public and private occurs as companies begin to operate in a structuring capacity, providing a new governing architecture Remote Year worker answers emails on top of Machu Picchu. Charles Du, 2017

that allows its users to bypass services that are not provided by the WeWork branding strategy. By being overlaid onto a transnational network, WeWork begins to operate as a separate architecture, grafted onto more traditional systems of urban infrastructure. Vision for the WeWork Ecosystem. Miguel McKelvely, 2009

56 In describing itself and the services it provides, The We Company (seeded from WeWork), claims its mission is: “To create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living.” This admission describes a desire to provide essential services as a holistic branding strategy. While it overtly describes itself as a builder of community, where “creators” act as independent agents collaborating with like-minded and driven individuals, its real function is to provide a gated public. Similarly to how transnational companies act in para-governmental capacities

WeWork common area in Dalian Lu, Shanghai. Nick Tortajada, 2018

Communal space in WeLive Crystal City, Washington, DC. WeLive

Play space in WeGrow, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group. David Burke, 2018

Branding stills from The We Company’s website. www.we.co, 2019

(i.e. Google, Apple, etc.), WeWork acts in a similar capacity but extends beyond the economic role into providing the social, educational, health, and other essential services to its user base. This framing of the We Company is intended to bring like-minded individuals together to overcome traditional boundaries of collaboration and to cultivate a creative work culture. It is therefore positioned as a global community framed on the basis of tiered access. While WeWork’s mission of grafting onto (and inevitably supplanting) localized infrastructure is largely framed in utopian terms, its ultimate goal is to provide a tiered social and economic system that one can buy into via membership (as opposed to citizenship). In a perverse sense, what is often referred to as “community” in various co-working enterprises functions more as creating a condensed entrepreneurial caste that separates “workers” from “creators.” As it begins to take on childcare and educational services as an alternative to public schools, the We Company also ensures the reproduction of a new generation of membership and social continuity within the system.

In fact, WeWork (We Company) is valued as and has a business model that is more analogous to a tech start-up, despite that fact that its primary revenue source is the subleasing of real estate. This validates the position that the We Company’s primary interest is providing a service rather than simply renting out shared office space. Even founder Adam Neumann rather esoterically described the business model as such: “WeWork” isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.”

While this description fits the larger agenda of culture building, the company is fundamentally different than a traditional real estate venture. For example, while hot desks are offered as an affordable option, they also function as a

branding strategy and amenity to higher tier customers and therefore add to the overall value proposition. Even the cultivated culture of start ups and “creators” is offered out as a service to larger, more established firms looking to lease for events. The very nature of independent contractors/companies under the same roof is commodified as network opportunities and participation in a shared culture. WeLive similarly offers the value proposition of shared culture and networking above a simple real estate transaction. While WeWork spends more than traditional real estate ventures on cultural and branding opportunities without the significantly higher revenue, its value as a company is based more on speculation and name recognition. While not necessarily nefarious by nature, co-working strategies operate on a model that creates a new privatized public. These new networks are then grafted onto public urban infrastructure and either meet gaps that the state and traditional private enterprise are unable to, or provide higher quality services. By exploiting this demand and building robust systems of services (such as housing, work space, health, and educational services) WeWork and similar institutions have expanded beyond the office environment towards a new holistic system that allows users members to immerse themselves within a greater platform.