Blog

I started this research backwards compared to my colleagues on the project: instead of choosing a residential place and moving outward, I started from the centre and moved out. That's because almost all of the city's coworking spaces and cafés are concentrated in a centre-north corridor. How could I study a neighbourhood, especially the third spaces remote workers might use there, when that kind of public space barely exists to begin with? Specialty coffee arrived in Bucharest in a boom, fro...

As part of my fieldwork, I spent a day touring neighbourhoods with Esenyurt's former mayor, who had been removed from office for political reasons. From morning until evening, we moved through the district together. We drank tea with voters, talked to shopkeepers, and went to two funerals for the former mayor to offer condolences. He introduced me to local residents and encouraged me to introduce myself in Kurdish, as we were visiting predominantly Kurdish neighbourhoods. Screenshot I ...

One of the central themes of this research is houses and homes, as we are trying to figure out how working from home is transforming the organisation of space in the house, as well as how it is changing practices of home-making. In Amsterdam, I have been invited to a few houses so far by notable people of a slightly older generation than myself; remote workers in their twenties and thirties tend to instantly take me up on the offer of coffee. Every time someone invites me to their house, I feel...

"It is 45 degrees outside!"  I exclaimed as I sat down across from Alisha in a café in Gurugram. It was one of those afternoons in May when the city felt almost impossible to inhabit. The heat radiated from the asphalt, the glass buildings amplified the temperature, and every movement outdoors felt like a negotiation with exhaustion. I continued complaining about the lack of trees, shade, and the growing dependence on air-conditioning that seemed to define urban life in North ...

My first blog post focused on how people work from tiny apartments in Milan. This one turns to another important site of remote work: co-working spaces. Milan offers a large variety of co-working spaces, whose transformations and economic models have also been explored by scholars and national media. What struck me most during my fieldwork was the desolation and emptiness of co-working spaces owned by global corporations. With the diffusion and normalisat...

One of the biggest challenges of carrying out fieldwork in Brussels has been finding a suitable time to meet people for interviews. While I am myself juggling research with teaching responsibilities (and a few side projects, such as teaching yoga and photography), my research participants are rarely available. Additionally, Belgium is divided into Flemish and Walloon regions, and certain holidays are separated. In practice, this means that instead of two weeks of school holidays around Easter f...

I met Rosa one Sunday afternoon in the beautiful Chapultepec Woods in the north of Mexico City. She was sitting with her daughter and her daughter’s father, surrounded by lush greenery. They seemed relaxed, laughing and enjoying the tranquil afternoon. “It’s sublime,” I thought. I approached her to ask if I could take a photo of her. One thing led to another, and Rosa and I started spending time together. However, my image of the perfect family soon faded as I learned more a...

Shanghai’s dense landscape of independent cafés forms an important backdrop to remote work. The city is known for its abundance of coffee shops, many of which are not global chains but carefully designed independent businesses. Their interiors are often striking: soft lighting, tasteful furniture, plants, large windows, textured walls, and small decorative details that invite both lingering and photographing. For many café goers in Shanghai, visiting such...

What follows draws on interviews with 30 people working in hybrid or remote arrangements in Bucharest, Romania, across a range of work fields, household compositions, ages, and genders. The focus here is narrow: how work itself and what people do, and the position they occupy within organisations, shape their capacity to exercise control over their working lives. Flexibility is not one thing When workers and employers talk about flexible arrangements, they usually mean how many days someo...

In Turkiye, remote work is often associated with coworking spaces in Şişli, freelancers working from cafés in Kadıköy, and startup incubators in Beşiktaş. Then why choose Esenyurt, a densely populated working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Istanbul, to conduct fieldwork on remote work? For my first encounter with Esenyurt, I travelled all the way to the last stop on the metro, the westernmost point of Istanbul, and then continued with a short minibus ride to Esenyurt. When I first a...

To get a deeper understanding of how remote work is experienced in everyday environments, I have been diving into the history of my Amsterdam field site, a municipal district named ‘Oud-West/De Baarsjes’. As the name shows, it essentially combines two neighbourhoods. This is a relatively new organisational structure put in place a few years ago and part of a longer series of municipal experiments on how to divide Amsterdam’s many buurten (small areas of often just a few streets), wijken (larger...

On a Sunday afternoon, I found myself standing at the edge of a cricket field near Kadarpur village in Gurugram. The city felt distant here, even though it was only a short drive from the Golf Course Extension Road. The ground was uneven in places, bordered by sparse trees, and beyond it, one could still glimpse fragments of Gurugram’s expanding skyline. Men in coordinated jerseys moved across the field, some stretching, others joking, while a few sat in the shade, checking their phones, sm...

Photo by Elisabetta Costa Fieldwork in the eight cities of the ReWorkChange project began in February. The goal of the project is to explore and compare the social consequences of digitally enabled remote work on people’s everyday lives. Eight researchers are each conducting ethnographic research in a neighbourhood in one of the following cities: Amsterdam, Brussels, Bucharest, Istanbul, Mexico City, Milan, New Delhi, and Shanghai. I have also started my research in Milan and have already...