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Work and the Open Source City

Posted By Laura Forlano On June 3, 2009 @ 9:10 am In Vanguard | 15 Comments

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Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of

technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip

through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get

a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an

entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the

bookIm Outta Here![2] The group met around mid-day at New Work City[3],

one of Manhattans first coworking communities. The space, located on the

5th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil

(SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in

November 2008.


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New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge

work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned

during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions

of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities

revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, andtelecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that

have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps[4] and BarCamps[5]) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of

organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time,

enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.


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women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle

sign on the table that announced Creative Club in large letters and Jelly in

smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly[8], founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February

2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at

someones apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to

the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations

professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their

effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I

presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designerEzio Manzini[9], presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship

at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives

such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such,

the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the

past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed

onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas

Workspace[10], a coworking community for writers and researchers located on

a Am I really in Brooklyn, New York? street lined with large Victorian houses


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garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses

are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office

uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas

Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of

which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded

colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young

children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September

2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the

synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate

quiet work like writing with loud work such as doing phone interviews,

which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar

activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking[11], a community for designers indowntown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at

EcoSystems[12], which is currently located on the 4th floor, guided us through

all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty

stair after another since we had exceeded the elevators carrying capacity. The

building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique

furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In

describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking

community in January 2009, Tyson said, I want to be surrounded by really

smart peopleI have a strong affinity for community. Treehouse will soon be


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offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested inlearning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the dayrecalled a very different experience that Id had several weeks earlier whileaway at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived therigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from TheX-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks thatscanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reservea hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously closeto the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out thenearest Internet caf (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, callAT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, uponentering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed tomake calls while in the caf. In addition, only one person was allowed toaccompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge.Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japans

Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the countrys unemployed youthwho have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of anEnglish telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hourcafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pinkcomic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs andshower caps for 160 yen in the womens restroom so that their guests canfreshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though Icant claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hourvisit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction,


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perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found

to my utter surprise that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me

to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a

redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative.

Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after

all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See

Gallery[13]

in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importanceof opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on

media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the

reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the

changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our

identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers wont ask

What do you do? over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East

Village but rather Where do you work? Rather than merely a place to do

work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount

of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as

choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research

interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in

communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational

behavior, and science and technology studies.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the

position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New

York.

Article printed from Urban Omnibus: http://urbanomnibus.net

URL to article: http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/06/work-and-the-open-

source-city/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://urbanomnibus.net/main/wp-

content/uploads/2009/06/osc7.jpg

[2] Im Outta Here!: http://www.lulu.com/content/6253513

[3] New Work City: http://www.nwcny.com/

[4] MeetUps: http://www.meetup.com/

[5] BarCamps: http://www.barcamp.org/

[6] Open Government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_government

[7] Kauffman Foundation: http://www.kauffman.org/


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[8] Jelly: http://workatjelly.com/

[9] Ezio Manzini: http://www.sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/

[10] Ditmas Workspace: http://www.ditmasworkspace.com/

[11] Treehouse Coworking: http://treehouse-nyc.com/

[12] EcoSystems: http://www.ecosystemsbrand.com/

[13] The Change You Want To See Gallery:

http://thechangeyouwanttosee.com/

Copyright 2009 Urban Omnibus. All rights reserved.

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