A wave of resilient coworking spaces is countering the mainstream or neo-corporate model of coworking spaces, as embodied by global franchise chains like WeWork. These spaces have a twofold effect. First, they encourage people to thrive in an increasingly unstable job market. Second, they offer the opportunity to experience genuine community and solidarity. Sana Ahmad and Marie Konrad discuss this ambivalent potential by examining bUm, a coworking space fighting for survival.
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A major critique of neoliberalism centers on the systemic individualization of workforce and the isolation of labor tactics to resist increasing precarity, managerial despotism, and dissatisfaction with and alienation at work. Across sectors and skill levels, workers confront a destabilizing convergence of stagnant or uncertain wages, unchecked hours, flexible contracts, and work intensification – strains further compounded by the structural risks of AI and future of work, geopolitical volatility, and ecological crises.
The neoliberal subjectivity percolating within these conditions – where workers become the “ultimate entrepreneurs of the self” to remain viable on the market – is not yet distanced from the need for community. Even within a capitalist logic, community offers workers as a space to “self-improve” and develop skills in autonomy, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and resilience – qualities demanded by an increasingly unstable labor market.
Ambivalent sociality
Coworking spaces are well-explored sites of this ambivalent sociality: self-improvement against self-commodification, belonging against alienation, community against individuality. These daily experiences shape workers’ subjectivities, laying a foundation that can positively inform political praxis both within and beyond the workplace. The promise of, and disillusionment with, coworking sites lies in the bridging of different aspects of people’s lives: work and social reproduction, the latter dependent on the mostly unpaid and gendered work of reproducing labor power.
While critical research on coworking shows how coworking hubs can simultaneously impose subtle regimes of self-discipline, performance pressure, and emotional labor, thereby creating feelings of alienation, a closer look through social reproduction theory enables us to read these sites instead as possibilities of reproducing collective capacity. As Tithi Bhattacharya argues, “every battle for housing, for free healthcare, or for clean water carries the potential to become part of a wider anti-systemic struggle.”
More than a “market device”
The article here looks at the coworking space bUm – a radical political experiment that emerged from neighborhood resistance to Google’s plan for a tech campus in Kreuzberg. Its approach should be viewed in the wider context of the coworking ecosystem. Coworking spaces have boomed across Germany – up nearly 60% since 2020, according to the German Coworking Spaces Association (BVCS). Berlin alone now has 228 of them, more than any other German city, putting it alongside London and Amsterdam as European hub for flexible work.
bUm’s operational model functions as part of the what Alessandro Gandini and Alberto Cossu map as the “third wave,” quite different from the “mainstream” or “neo-corporate” phase that has come to be dominated by global franchise giants like WeWork, Regus, and Impact Hub, and embracing a highly entrepreneurial, neoliberal ethos of “collaborative individualism.” The third wave, they argue, represents resilient spaces that prioritize the actual quality of social relations and balance both economic sustainability and social impact. The community these spaces cultivate is more than a “market device” and it is a site where something genuinely political might take root.
bUm grew out of people’s opposition rooted in material concerns over gentrification, rising rents, and the displacement of low-income residents. Sustained public pressure – weekly protests held every Friday for over a year, combined with bureaucratic hurdles – pushed Google to agree to a usage contract as part of its corporate social responsibility practices, handing over roughly 2,500 square meters of office space to the social cooperative Karuna and the donation platform betterplace, rent-free, who then founded bUm. In 2024, Google extended the agreement for two more years; around the same time, the bUm team bought out all company shares, achieving full political independence and the ability to operate as an autonomous space.
A form of internal redistribution
At the heart of bUm lies its solidarity-based pricing model. Based on the rent-free usage of the space, the model functions as a form of internal redistribution: paid event bookings generate the income that allows bUm to offer affordable rates for coworking and events, and when capacity allows, free use of the space for activists and organizations without financial stability.
Cecilia Pedersen from Denmark, working as a program manager for a non-profit from Iraq, notes: “Due to funding constraints and government-cuts, it is just so hard to organize for the Left, because we don’t have safe and proper spaces where we can do so. Many NGOs like mine are simply not able to cover office spaces, with the very little funding they have available, which means many of us end up working very isolated, which then again means that our work is much less effective.”
bUm’s roughly 50 member organizations (around 1000 alumni in total) work on issues ranging from political education and climate justice to anti-discrimination, culture and art – many led by people with migrant backgrounds, economically vulnerable groups, and those explicitly engaged in solidarity with Palestine who have lost spaces or funding amid political witch-hunts in Germany. Since bUm’s opening in 2019, the power of financial capital through real estate and rising rents, has grown alongside a rightward political shift, making it all the more crucial to sustain a space where different groups can operate and coordinate political struggle through events and community-building.
Mati Shemoelof, a writer and artist from Haifa, notes: “Places like bUm protect something fragile but essential: the ability of people to think, organize, create, and collaborate outside purely commercial logic. Without such spaces, the city (Berlin) would lose much of its democratic and cultural energy, as well as its own purpose as a culturally diverse capital of Germany.”
Part of something larger
Coworking spaces are semi-professional sites where people who’ve been atomized by the logic of individualized labor can begin, tentatively, to see themselves as part of something larger. They offer something rare in contemporary working life: the experience of sharing space with people whose interests broadly align with your own. It lays the groundwork to build solidarity outside specific labor processes and employment structures. As Omar Alawad, a civil society professional working on supporting activists in Sudan, puts it: “Community for me is relationships that go beyond the ‘work’ space into our personal lives – relationships that make us feel we are not alone, that we’re empowered.”
This solidarity is based on a different kind of mutual recognition, one that is based not on shared employment but on shared vulnerability. For migrant workers in particular, this takes concrete and urgent forms especially in spaces of social reproduction. Housing information, visa bureaucracy, language learning, navigating employment law in an unfamiliar country are not abstract political concerns but daily contours of an increasingly anti-immigrant environment. Carolina Carmona from Colombia, working in traditional and digital marketing notes that “this space is not just to work but also be heard.”
bUm has become a site of practical solidarity: language tandems, skill sharing, community gardens or collective engagement with wider political questions including those that reach far beyond the immediate workplace. Gibran Mena-Aguilar, a writer and visual artist from Mexico, argues the significance of autonomy in imagining alternative forms of life: “In times of the racist, sexist algorithm reproducing itself through liberal institutions and inequalities, and which keeps getting more and more embedded in technologies such as AI, critical thinking is fundamental to keep our autonomy and protect common forms of life.”
Precarious community
Coworking spaces are, nonetheless, built on the very foundations of capitalism and individualized subjectivity that they offer to resolve. They are as Eugenio Capitani and co-authors put it, “ambivalent infrastructures” – ones that also depend on the emotional and often gendered labor that required to maintain community, organize social events and mediate conflict.
At bUm, participation in community events and collective projects often depends on the initiative of the bUm team and a handful of people volunteering to lead. This work frequently falls to non-cis-male members, and often to people already working overtime in underfunded NGOs. At the same time, demanding work schedules, personal circumstances and burnout leave even the most committed members struggling to engage as deeply as they – or the community – would like.
Therefore, the task for Die Linke and the political left more broadly is to strengthen their vision of the Caring City by protecting and supporting spaces like bUm. These spaces embody the practical aspects of the proposal for care centers, which aims to promote communal care work.
Fighting to protect autonomous spaces in Berlin
bUm faces the same structural threat as other autonomous spaces in Berlin; as its rent-free arrangement comes to an end, the US-based real estate company that owns the building is unwilling to negotiate the rent down, putting both the coworking space and the community it has built at risk of disappearing. The collective capacity that theorists of social reproduction conceptualize is now evolving in an active campaign – one fighting to protect autonomous spaces in Berlin while also searching for an affordable, politically ethical space bUm’s members could relocate to. This is an evolving process that reflects the challenges and opportunities of collective organizing.
In view of this traditional class institutions, such as trade unions, must ask important questions to coordinate workers whose resistance tactics against disempowerment have become more individualized. Social reproduction theory can help identify these questions. For example: What kinds of collectives are people forming beyond traditional labor institutions? How do these intersect with their spaces of social reproduction? How might such collectives be supported and drawn into the workplace as sites of a shared struggle?
Die Linke’s role in the new government in Berlin offers hope for imagining alternatives rooted in people’s autonomy and self-determination and supporting spaces for coordinating political struggles that have the potential to upend capitalism.