Urban Preserves: Coworking and Middle-Classed Resilience

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Philosophy, Theory and Critique Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This essay explains how urban infrastructure can placate the sense of middle-class dislocation. Commonly called “a happiness business,” the coworking movement indicates how telecommuting, or its providence of branded coffee and cool workspaces, may represent a utopia of information work. Given that many coworking users are precarious freelancers however, this utopia is necessarily also an attempt to stitch together a fraying sense of middle-class coherence. Using fieldwork interviews and discourse analysis of coworking materials, I argue that coworking allows us to understand first, an affective politics, namely the reframing of precarity from a structural condition to a state of individual loneliness. Second, it indicates a reengineering of the middle-classed good life, where acts of resilience are described to bring people closer to true happiness. Last, coworking infrastructure materializes these affective conditions through human and non-human factors.

Author

• Renyi Hong, National University of Singapore