Blog

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...