By Andrew Laing, PhD / Work&Place Journal Edition 3 – June 2014, Pages 11-14
Tags: workplace design • technology • urbanisation

The changing relationship between work and place challenges our inherited ideas about offices and, now, a combination of the physical and digital is transforming the urban landscape too

The Shift to Urban Scale
As we explore the future of work and place, we are beginning to see a shift towards an urban scale in how we frame the workplace problem. Our starting point is perhaps no longer the office but the city at large. And what we mean by the city may not be the bricks and mortar urbanism of the twentieth century, but a bricks and mortar urbanism imbued with digital information and connectivity: a powerful combination of the physical and digital.
This concept of what some have called a ‘sentient’ city provides us with a new perspective for the workplace (Shepard, 2010).It suggests new kinds of units and scales of analysis for how we understand work and place, and how we might program and plan workplaces in the future. We can begin to identify a new typology of workplaces. These urban kinds of workplaces are characterized not only by new kinds of spaces but also by new ways of procuring, obtaining, and using space. New patterns of working and using technology result in new ways space can be obtained and consumed that use online tools in markets that challenge the traditional supply and demand economy of office real estate.
Changes in work, technology, and space use are driving the demand for an architecture and urbanism (physical and virtual) that is more hybrid, mixed use, connected and permeable. This urban architecture is likely to be almost the opposite of the twentieth century’s Modern Movement’s segregation of functions and activities into purpose built, single use, zoned buildings and districts (Duffy, 1998).
I began to think more about this change of scale and perspective when I wrote a paper that explored the accommodation needs of the fast growing technology sector in New York City last year (Laing, 2013). What interests me most is that in creating new products, this sector pioneers many new ways of using space and technology. What was also interesting was the fact that the applications being developed are often designed to improve how we live and work in dense urban environments (for example, better ways of ordering food, buying clothes, meeting people, finding doctors etc.).
The technology workplace has become a harbinger of wider trends and innovations in how we design, use, and obtain space. This takes many different forms: from the use of a wide variety of co-working spaces, to the urban “meet-up culture,” and the ways in which technology enables space to be found and consumed in new ways. Yet the tech industry in New York also highlights the importance of the dense networked physical fabric of environments (the bricks and mortar) for working and living in the city, even in an increasingly virtualized world.
Two big shifts stand out which have more general implications for work and place: the shift towards collaborative and urban “workscapes” that are more heterogeneous, mixed-use and multi-scaled; and a related shift to the collaborative consumption of workspace and workspace-as-service.
Looking at the technology sector also highlights the apparently never-ending impact of innovation on how we use technology to work and live. It is information technology that has enabled what is now a mature yet continuing 25-year old revolution that constantly re-shapes the relationships between the individual worker and work spaces; breaking apart what Duffy called the Taylorist industrial model of work time and work space (Duffy 1998), in particular the fixed allocation of individuals to dedicated individual workspaces.
Cities remain valued creative centres
It is also somewhat surprising to find that it is technology that is augmenting, re-defining and accentuating the advantages of central places and dense urban environments as preferred locations of work. While technology has enabled mobility and the ability to work in many different kinds of places, urban centres appear more than ever the privileged location. Technology means that the conventional, narrowly prescriptive, architectural programming of different kinds of spaces is becoming less relevant as knowledge workers behave more like ‘cyborg foragers’ and appropriate spaces as they need them (Mitchell, 2003). Yet cities are ever more valued as centres of networking and creativity.
There was a period in the 1970s when thinkers about work and place believed that networked computers would mean a decline in the importance of central locations in favour of an ability to work from ‘tele-cottages’ or to telecommute (Graham, 2004). Quite the contrary appears to be happening.  Even as we appear to need fewer highly specialised or tailored work spaces, the design of space and the particularities of location are by no means irrelevant.
New hierarchies of value for places and spaces are emerging: the most valuable being those that are well connected to public transport and that integrate, superimpose, and connect multiple kinds of virtual and social networks (Duffy, 1998). These are the places that make a difference: they are meaningful, beautiful, interesting or significant in ways that other places are not. Information technology adds value to such places and changes how we use them, enriching the value of the city as the ultimate network of networks.
In contrast to the industrial model of work and workplaces in which workers would be collocated in the office (or factory) to work on supervised tasks during a fixed working day, the much more plural and social nature of knowledge work depends on a wider-scale network of physical and virtual relationships. In this sense, an urban scale of proximity is of great value to organizations.

It is within cities that a nomadic way of working can be most successful, supporting individual users with a choice of places and settings in which interactive and solo work can happen…