Cities and offices “for people”: How Google is building a prototype campus for a platform world

Abstract

Building on organization study’s nascent interest in the organizational potential of liminal urban spaces beyond the confines of traditional firms, this article chronicles how Google draws on participatory urban practices to appropriate and simulate urban commons as an extension of the tech campus. Weaving together ethnographic fieldwork from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I show how the city serves as a laboratory for prototyping new organizational paradigms that blend workplace gamification with urban activation strategies, by focusing on the spaces “in-between.” That is, areas of everyday urban life that are not (yet) fully enclosed as formal production sites, while providing important avenues for market expansion and commodification in a digital age. By staging a holistic ecology of work and life under the corporate canopy, Google’s urban-style platforms aim to extract sociability as an economic fuel, while curtailing the unruly potential of the street as the dwelling place of the collective.