The City is the Office   Andrew Harrison / Director of Research & Methods Now that information networks cover the entire world like a large cobweb, we don't have to be confined to our offices when we work. In such a situation, an inquiry into the future of workplace needs an approach more comprehensive than relying only on the office space as a tool of analysis. We must think in terms of a larger context such as society or life as a whole. DEGW's project, "The City is the Office", led by Andrew Harrison, is based on such an approach. It is an attempt to tap the potential of various urban locations as a workplace. At DEGW, our group is at the forefront of exploring the future of the workplace. For the past nine years we have been involved in an intelligent building research project. In 1991-1992, we studied intelligent buildings in Europe, which was really the first major study looking at intelligent buildings in European context. We did a follow-up study in 1995-1996, which was looking at intelligent buildings in Southeast Asia. In 1998-1999, we also did a study in Brazil, an area undergoing a great change. What was exciting to us during this process of research was a transition from intelligent buildings to intelligent cities. In San Paulo, the business district shifted three times in the 20th century, four miles every thirty years. As a result, old buildings were left behind. When we saw those decaying buildings, we started to think about how these places could be reinvented. This eventually developed into a concept called "The City is the Office." We think this can have a significant impact from both an organizational point of view and a city point of view. We think we are going to see a fundamental change in the ownership of space and the management of space. A New Organizational Model Has a Shorter Business Cycle In this presentation we refer to the change of communication technology and a new model of property ownership. If we look back through a historical mapping, the 1980s focused on efficiency. This was very much an era of building management system. If we move to the 1990s, there was a shift towards how places could support people, a move from property to process, from efficiency to effectiveness. So that led to the whole new ways of working movements at DEGW. Two trends are going on simultaneously. One is globalization and the other is the impact of the new digital economy. They influence each other. In parallel to that, we have the information technology trend. A tremendous amount of change is taking place in this field and people has accepted this huge change. In 1995, we were worried or concerned about global networking, about PC network, but this is an old model. What's important is to think about how billions of connected devices influence society. The whole way information is communicated, displayed and shared is totally changing. The workplace should reflect that change. A Building Is Just a Node of Network The technology worth watching is Bluetooth, which is a technology in terms of short-distance networking. This is an incredible technology, because it can construct its own network through Bluetooth devices linking to other devices. It is a very fluid networking protocol. And very significant thing about the third generation mobile is that it can locate telephone users in a matter of a few square meters. What this will mean is that the way you interact with a city and the way you interact with others will change. We call this "pervasive computing" and this will become a key concept in the future. The whole way of people interacting with spaces will change. So we should forget about the fixation of buildings and think about wider environments and look at spaces between buildings and how they function as workplaces, because with this technology work is done everywhere, can be done everywhere. So you start to think about buildings just as intelligent nodes of a network. The key issue will be the concept of intelligent organization network, which can be realized in terms of intelligent cities or intelligent areas. The city is a place for people to do what they need to do. The city has become an urban environment for living, working and moving. There are layers and layers of intersecting organizational networks and any individual can become a member of many networks simultaneously. Your social life, work life and home life are all set outside the building and you as an individual need to be able to move up and down between organizational networks. The places will support that. Customers, Brand and Knowledge Are the Only Irreplaceable Organizational Values More and more organizations are realizing that they can't achieve everything by themselves. Partnering is critical. They need to do things in partnership with other organizations. This is what we call "Networked Organizations." What does that sort of lifestyle mean to individuals? There is a concept called "Matrix Living." Fundamental is this idea of partnering. If you look at many organizations, core assets are three things; customers, brand and knowledge. Everything else can be provided through alternative routes. Interestingly, if you look at the UK market, this applies to public buildings as well. For example, hospitals, where staff and buildings are provided by third-party organizations. All you have left is the concept that this is a hospital and sick people. Everything else is managed through outsourcing. So that will happen more and more to organizations and there will be an interdependency between a service solution provider and a customer/brand owner. There will be more and more cross-business collaboration. Importance of Organizational Culture and Identity Will Diminish In future, project spaces rather than organizational spaces will become fundamental, because the idea of organizational culture and identity is becoming less important. In the last twenty years there was a fundamental shift from the idea of a building as an object that people invested in to an idea that it is actually a place where you can deliver high-value global services. It's a way of trapping a number of customers and then you can sell them telephone services, all sorts of different things. From the demand side point of view, from an organizational point of view, a few years ago they tried to acquire spaces and services within a building rather than buying a building and now they have moved to look for global solutions. So far this is the hard side. What is more important is the soft side. A new design philosophy is necessary. What's important is how people feel included in new types of space, how to manage de-location of people, process and place when people are working all over the world and having different expectations about workplace, and how space can foster culture and community. The diagram F explores this a bit further. Instead of the old Hive/Den/Cell/Club model, we started to think there are three different types of broad space. More and more business will be done in a Coffee Bar type of space. It's an informal space and a high-level collaboration area where unstructured activities such as chattering take place. In addition, there are still Club type spaces which are more for teamworking and are more formal and structured than coffee bar type. And there is what we call a "Cloister" for contemplation and concentrated tasks. It is interesting to note that there is a congruence between the physical place and the virtual place. The Coffee Bar is equivalent to the Internet and a variation of the Club is the Extranet, which allows information to be exchanged and shared easily and cheaply by connecting Intranets of different organizations with the Internet. And the Cloister parallels the Intranet. So start to think about real estate strategies having to cross the virtual and real, physical spaces. In some of the locations, you may provide physical spaces. In other words, you may not rely on virtual equivalent to fulfill the same functions. We have started to think that actual urban places should take a cultural and community role over a bit more strongly. The Club and the Coffee Bar could be shared spaces. More and more of the future is about working between organizations. So why should I provide this space for these other companies? Let's go to a neutral space that belongs to someone else. They can provide the spaces and services, so this becomes a sort of city public space. This would provide a great opportunity for cities to regenerate themselves through this sort of workplace model. Part of public buildings such as cathedrals, museums and libraries will suddenly become workplaces generating business. If you push this to a far extreme, it may be possible under this model to create an organization which has no physical space. All of its spaces are virtually shared and people's homes become the Cloister space. And everything else can be borrowed and rented, and it is used just when you need it, so the organization becomes physical only when you rent a conference center or a hotel and disperses back into a virtual infrastructure. Key Space is 'Club Type Cafe There is a great opportunity at the efficiency side. There are huge opportunities for sustainability. We are talking about reusing old buildings and old infrastructures and increasing the density of users and making them more significant in longer term benefits toward sustainability. This is about reinventing the city. It's also about organizations liberating capitals, because if you start using only the needed spaces, that money can be reinvested in the business, in reinventing the business. Organizations can be much more responsive and flexible, because they don't have to have this big white elephant around the world. From the effectiveness point of view, it's about optimizing time and reducing commuting time by blending living, working and moving. It also provides opportunities for innovations and networking, because you mix with other people from other organizations instead of being isolated within a comfortable zone within your organization. That's where new ideas are coming from and that will create a new business. We are still trying to revive the Hive/Den/Cell/Club scheme to see if there's some life left. The characteristics of low interaction and low autonomy are interesting in the urban level. The Club type Caf is the key space for the future. It doesn't exist, but we have a precedent in terms of serviced offices a huge rise of serviced offices, but what they are said to be doing is providing a traditional office space with a flexible tenure. To think about how people would use these new spaces, we have come up with an initial concept or model. Again taking the Coffee Bar/Club/Cloister model, you have to use that as a village store, as a campsite, as a tree house and as a fortress or a mission control. In future, living, working and moving will be blended in the city. If you go to Euston Station in London, there is a health center upstairs, so you can go and see a doctor without an appointment. So moving and living are blended. There is a shopping center combined with a university, so after you've done shopping, you can go to a lecture for your degree. Things like that are really exciting. What sorts of spaces or technology are needed to support that? So we see new team development in new districts and buildings for international business. But I think it would be nice if we combine this with more and more regeneration, reuse of existing downtown areas and buildings, so that the downtown is rebuilt and there will be more mixed living and working districts. In London, eleven million square feet of office space has been turned into living space. The space that was no good as offices has been reborn as living space. So all of a sudden, the population in London is increasing quite significantly with improved infrastructures. London has started to become self-generated and I think this will happen in more and more cities. (an excerpt from ECIFFO 38 March 31, 2001)