The original note, as written at the time
There is such a thing as remote working, alright. But guess what it has quite a number of challenges. Employers say it doesn’t quite promote the team spirit and employees themselves say that the distractions of the home can be quite the hassle. Now, how about we do this. We set up dedicated co-working spaces distributed throughout the city. We then get employers to register their employees, attaching them to specific co-working centres, each to the one closest to his or her residence. This way the employees get to have an office away from the office but much much closer to where they live without necessarily getting them to work in their living rooms.
Ongoing development
There is such a thing as remote working, alright. But guess what — it has quite a number of challenges.
Employers will tell you it does not promote team spirit, and they are not entirely wrong. Employees will tell you the distractions of the home can be quite the hassle, and they are not wrong either. The argument then settles into a familiar stalemate: bring everybody back to the office and lose the time and the cost of the commute, or keep everybody at home and lose the collaboration and the boundary between work and life. Both sides are describing a real loss.
But the stalemate only exists because we have assumed the two options are the office and the house. There is a third thing, and it is not a compromise between them. It is a different arrangement.
Set up dedicated co-working spaces distributed throughout the city — not one central hub, but many, sized to their neighbourhoods and placed within walking distance of housing. Then have employers register their staff and attach each person to the centre closest to their home. The employee gets an office away from the office, close enough to walk to, and nobody has to work in their living room.
The point of distribution is that the commute stops being the cost. A single central office forces everyone to converge, and the convergence is what makes the commute long, the transport expensive and the land valuable. Many small centres reverse that: the workplace becomes as distributed as the housing, and the distance between them becomes a walk rather than a journey.
There is a coordination cost and I will not pretend it away. Teams are now spread across several sites, which is precisely the team-spirit objection the employer raised in the first place. But that objection was raised against the home, not against distribution. A co-working centre is a workplace with colleagues in it, whether or not they are the same colleagues, and the small collision of being near other working people is worth more than the isolation of a bedroom desk.
And the model gives the employer something they cannot get at home: a place they can inspect, a place with a door, and hours that are still hours. It gives the employee the boundary that remote work destroys. It gives the city something too — a layer of small workplaces spread through the residential fabric, occupied in the daytime, which is exactly the kind of foot traffic that makes a street safe and a shop viable.
The design of the centres matters more than the real estate does. Shared desks and bad acoustics will not survive. What is required is the ordinary infrastructure of serious work — quiet rooms, proper connections, light, somewhere to take a call without apologising.