In the “Coworking in the Future City” panel consisting of Jayson White, Executive Director of Adaptive Office Resources, Cat Johnson of Cat Johnson Co., Neal Gorenflo, Co-Founder, Chief Editor, and Executive Director of Shareable, Liz Elam, GCUC Executive Producer, and Ashley Proctor, Executive Director of 312 and Executive Producer of GCUC Canada.  The panel discussed how to use coworking to build a world more focused on humans.

The Future City

The panel started the conference off by stating the need to decolonize and reclaim the idea of the future.  The current vision that many hold of our future city is a corporate image.  However, this image and other similar narratives must be questioned to craft our own story about what the future is.  Humans and connection with one another and our surroundings should be the focus of the future city.  Ideally, the future should encompass a city of the people by the people where we can share resources.  With this, we can attack concerns surrounding prominent societal issues like social isolation, racial equity, and the environment.

How Coworking Can Help

There should be a variety of ways to that people view success.  The coworking community can be an important platform in creating the diversity of business models that depict how communities grow and accumulate wealth.  

Coworking communities should highlight the interaction available in their spaces.  Tightly controlled projects have trouble coming alive because they have trouble creating a strong sense of authenticity that the people want and look for.  People seek community and tend to look to their cities to help them form a concrete identity. Although coworking is in the prototypical stage, by planting the seeds now, the future city can be one in which all people can share resources and spread their individual knowledge to one another for a more complete worldview.  

However, in order to better understand the human experience, it is important to have different viewpoint present.  Community spaces play an important role in bringing diverse people together. Take action to inject those different ideas and energies to as much of that product as possible.  Your space should want to develop its members as more fully realized human beings and give them a rich social and cultural experience to connect them to their community. Help members cultivate their careers so that can move to bigger places.  Build spaces that can create opportunity for its members and the community.