Herding cats : co-work, creativity and precarity in inner Sydney

George Morgan, James Woodriff

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

This chapter will consider independent co-work spaces, in Sydney, Australia, a city where land values have increased spectacularly over the last twenty years. It draws on data from a small pilot study and argues that while such places emerge most commonly in gentrifying metropolitan districts, usually around, and as part of, larger clusters of creative economic activity, they can be vulnerable to rising rents and rapid urban renewal. This precarity afflicts both the spaces themselves, the tenants of those spaces and the networks that potentially form between them. Despite being guided by cooperative and idealistic philosophies— particularly around sustained collaboration—such co-working is inherently precarious, particularly for those early career freelancers whose labour is artistic and experimental and therefore unlikely to guarantee short-run commercial returns. We briefly brief observations of three Sydney co-work spaces—Kommonz, The Sandpit, and The Pyrmont premises of WeWork a transnational co-work company—and compare and contrast them: their differential location within the symbolic spectrum of co-work. We will also present data from a single interview with JoJo, who works as the ‘host’ at Kommonz and is also the editor of an online magazine, Obscura, that is not yet commercially viable and she calls her ‘passion project’. Her testimony demonstrates that the ‘communities’ that form in such independent spaces, far from being determined by the random processes of market demand, are consciously ‘curated’, thus mirroring the informal social processes that shape network relations in more widely in the new economy. We also draw on JoJo’s biographical narrative testimony to demonstrate the appeal of co-work, as an ethics of working life for creative freelancers, but also to show that such arrangements can be as fragile as the creative incomes and careers of those who rent co-work spaces. New forms of public investment are required to sustain the spaces that accommodate much creative labour.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCreative Hubs in Question: Place, Space and Work in the Creative Economy
EditorsRosalind Gill, Andy C. Pratt, Tarek E. Virani
Place of PublicationSwitzerland
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages29-50
Number of pages22
ISBN (Electronic)9783030106539
ISBN (Print)9783030106522
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Keywords

  • self-employed
  • artists
  • office buildings
  • work environment

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