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Carlos Almansa Community Sunday, August 10, 2014

Are coworking spaces a new public space definition?

Are coworking spaces a new public space definition?

I recently came across this TED video by Amanda Burden regarding the urban planning of New York city. Amanda finishes the video saying: “I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party, people stay because they are having a great time”. In the video you can see one of the most well known public spaces in the last few years which is the High Line, promoted by “Friends of the High Line” and designed by Diller&Scofidio architects.

There is a lot you can say and argue about public spaces design and planning in the last few decades. There are also interesting approaches on how to develop public space in order to engage citizens within their cities, like the city of Curitiba and its major Jaime Lerner whom created an ingenious and creative program to raise the use of public transport, sustainability awareness programs, parks and other community resources. Quoting Lerner, “The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die”. Curitiba happened to be a success and became a paradigm of sustainable city development. 

Both examples claim to develop a people-oriented-design in which citizen take part in the future of their cities. Having say that and taking into account that when talking about urban planning and development results in general are in some cases obviously arguable, people should be considered as principal actors on designing and development processes to achieve a successful result. We have all the “hardware”(buildings, infrastructures, facilities, etc) which has to talk with the end-user through the "software" (institutions, politicians, urban planners, architects, designer, etc). When the software appears to be incompatible with the hardware, the user experience fails. 

In this point you maybe be thinking, What all off this have to do with coworking? Well, if you are into coworking you may surely find some coincidences with the examples above. Since coworking is writing new ways of working and collaborate together it’s a people-oriented workspace focused on the sense of community. On the other hand coworking also promotes the integration and relation between a wide range of professionals so they share knowledge and can start a project together. To end up with the metaphor I would say that in this case the physical space and facilities are the hardware whilst space managers, platforms, meals, etc are the software that lets coworkers to play a principal role that gives sense and fuel the hardware to make things happen. 

Reduction of workplaces distances, collaboration between people in the community, resources sharing, sustainability awareness, etc. These are some of the ways coworking is changing the way people work. 

 

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