The Affective Commons of Coworking
Human Relations
Coworking spaces promised community, autonomy, creativity, and shared atmosphere, but those promises often produced ambivalence as much as belonging.
What the paper argues
The article develops the idea of an affective commons: the shared atmospheric and emotional resource produced through the everyday labour of participants. In coworking spaces, community is not simply provided by the organisation. It is made and maintained through greeting, helping, hosting, connecting, and sustaining a feeling of possibility.
The paper argues that this creates a governance problem. If members collectively produce the atmosphere that gives the space value, then questions of recognition, capture, commodification, and commoning become central to understanding coworking.
Core concept: Affective commons: a shared atmospheric resource produced through immaterial and affective labour
Why it matters
This paper matters beyond coworking because many contemporary organisations depend on collectively produced atmospheres: cultures of trust, energy, openness, belonging, and creativity that are valuable precisely because they cannot be reduced to formal structure.
Coworking and the commons
This is the mature theory paper in the coworking research programme, connecting entrepreneurial communities, affective labour, and commons governance.
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