Coworking as Civic Infrastructure: Building What the Market Won’t

LinkedIn Show Notes #39 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen.

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Three people. Two continents. One pattern: They stopped waiting for the state to fix what’s broken and started building the infrastructure themselves.

This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We’ve been tracking a question that keeps showing up in different forms.

What happens when the systems we rely on—democracy, childcare, the economy—stop working for ordinary people?

The dominant story says wait. Wait for the government to fix it. Wait for the market to provide it. Wait for someone else to solve it.

We found three people who stopped waiting. Here’s what they built.

The Question We’re Chasing

Can ordinary people build what the state and market won’t provide?

That’s what we went looking for. We found four people who answered yes—and showed exactly how.

Ann-Marie Kinlock got made redundant while pregnant. Fell through the gaps in maternity pay. Watched her business collapse. Experienced maternal depression.

Then she built KindHaus —a coworking space with integrated childcare—because waiting for government to fix it wasn’t an option.

Imandeep Kaur is co-founder of CIVIC SQUARE , a community organisation in Birmingham that bought a Victorian terrace house on Link Road.

Not to flip it. To demonstrate what happens when you stop treating homes as assets and start treating them as “neighbourhood infrastructure for transition.”

They call it Retrofit House—funded by philanthropic organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, staffed by neighbours, part of a national network called Retrofit Reimagined.

Many hands, not deep pockets.

Indy Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and the person who put numbers on why top-down climate plans keep failing.

His research shows the government’s net-zero plans would require 600% more mineral extraction per year, from places already being destroyed.

His answer: neighbourhood-scale action. “Democracy will be born in the back streets and the back homes. It won’t be born in Westminster.”

Peter Block has spent decades proving that the room you’re sitting in—how the chairs are arranged, who gets to speak—determines whether you’re a citizen or an audience member.

At a protest, he watched strangers turn to each other and ask, “Why was it important for you to be here today?”

His reaction: “I thought, Oh my God, this is what heaven is like.”

None of them asked for permission.

And here’s what matters for you: Each of them did something you can do too.

Build a community organisation and buy a house? That takes years.

But ask a different question? Rearrange a room? Start with a prototype?

You can do that this week.

The Injustice We’re Tracking

Here’s what’s broken.

The Consumer Story tells us our only agency is choosing between options someone else has defined. Vote for this party or that one. Buy this childcare package or that one. Subscribe to this coworking chain or that one.

And if none of the options work for you? Tough. The market knows best.

This story hollows out the thing that actually sustains us—the messy, inconvenient, essential work of showing up for one another.

It tells mothers they’re failing because they can’t afford a system that was never designed for them.
It tells Birmingham City Council it’s “too big to govern” while selling off the very assets that could rebuild neighbourhood power.
It tells coworking operators under 150 members that they’re not a “real business” because they haven’t scaled to corporate levels.

Meanwhile, Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs puts numbers on it.

We don’t have the carbon budget to retrofit every UK home. We don’t have the material budget either. The government’s net-zero plans would require 600% more mineral extraction per year from places already being destroyed—Sudan, the DRC.

Even if we could do the energy transition we’re talking about, the extraction required would create so much harm that global systems would collapse before we got there.

The market won’t fix this.

The state won’t fix this.

People do.

Imandeep Kaur and Indy Johar: Democracy Born in Back Streets

🔴https://www.youtube.com/live/lRg___84eJQ?si=ZHpwMkzjJ1tgYL79

Imandeep quotes Adrienne Maree Brown: “Inch-wide, mile-deep change that schisms the existing paradigm.”

She’s not trying to reimagine libraries for the whole country.

She’s asking what happens when one terrace house in Birmingham becomes a site of radical imagination.

“If you’re born in 2000 onwards, you don’t know even the basics that a 1985 baby grew up with,” Imandeep says.

“You don’t know that a district nurse came and visited my mum every day for two weeks. You don’t know that the neighbourhood GP was about much more than that. These things are not in the cultural memory.”

Civic Square is trying to put them back. But updated for what’s coming.

They held Retrofit Reimagined festivals across five cities. Thousands of people came.

But by 2023, the research from Dark Matter Labs changed everything.

The question isn’t “How do you get more people to want to retrofit their homes?”

The question is “How do we retrofit our homes whilst understanding we don’t have the material or carbon budget to do it?”

That’s a very different question. And it only makes sense at the neighbourhood scale.

The six fundamentals they identified: regenerative resources, local energy, retrofit and densification, rewilding, and rebuilding community.

You can’t separate them. You can’t do them one by one.

The government says, “First, we’ll do all the insulation, then the cooling, then the windows, then the solar, then we’ll build 1.5 million homes.”

That takes us to the next millennia.

Indy puts it bluntly:

“Westminster doesn’t want to get it, and so they talk about it being complicated. But actually, when you get on the ground… an elderly gentleman, maybe 89, walked over to me after a speech and said, ‘Indy, I didn’t get everything that you said, but you put words on what I was feeling.'”

“I think everyone’s feeling this.”

The revelation: “Democracy will be born in the back streets and the back homes. It won’t be born in Westminster.”

What Civic Square is building, what Retrofit House demonstrates, is “a new site of freedom and a new site of conversational reality, which allows people to operate in doubt.”

In a world that demands certainty, doubt becomes radical.

Doubt means I recognise I don’t know everything. And if I don’t know, and you know something different, maybe together we’re better.

Peter Block: Rearranging the Room Is Rearranging Power

Peter’s been thinking about this for decades.

His observation: “Coworking is a welcome centre. It is an alternative to individuality, an alternative to upward mobility.”

The market economy treats us as consumers—objects to be commodified. Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z. Labels based on what we can be sold.

“Whereas coworking, with the word co, you invite people into something that we can produce together.”

He distinguishes between the market economy and what he calls the creative economy.

The market economy values scale, speed, and cost.

The creative economy values connection, intimacy, and creation.

Coworking spaces—the good ones—are where the creative economy happens.

“If you live in a coworking context, you’re going to live two years longer,” Peter says.

“If you volunteer 100 times a year, your life is extended two years. No pharmaceutical can promise me that.”

“Children, when their neighbours know their first name, perform better in school. They learn to read sooner in a relational environment than in an achievement environment.”

There’s a cost to the colonial mindset. Scale costs us connection. Efficiency costs us intimacy.

Peter wants to replace what he calls “royal protocols”—the structures that keep us well-behaved and under control—with “common good protocols.”

Instead of Q&A sessions where one person holds the microphone and everyone else sits in rows, break into small groups.

Ask uncomfortable questions.

“Why was it important for you to be here today?”

“What’s the crossroads you’re at at this stage of your life?”

He tells a story about a protest.

“The people organising the protest said, ‘Would you find four other people around you that you don’t know and talk to them about why was it important for you to be here today?’ I thought, Oh, my God, this is what heaven is like.”

That connection—stranger to stranger, asking real questions—had more to do with making a difference than any of the speeches.

“Your coworking spaces, the way you do them, are designed for liberation, not for productivity.”

“Do I want you to be productive? Yes, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is to create culture and space for liberation.”

Ann-Marie Kinlock: Building What the State Wouldn’t

Ann-Marie’s story is what happens when theory meets reality.

She was two months pregnant when she got made redundant.

Found a new job, knowing she’d have to have the conversation eventually about the baby coming.

Seven months into maternity leave, that company downsized too.

Because she hadn’t been there long enough, she didn’t qualify for proper maternity pay. Fell into maternity allowance. Couldn’t afford childcare.

“The way it works in the UK is that if you haven’t been at a company for a long enough period of time, you don’t get maternity pay… I couldn’t afford that system.”

“Therefore, I had to try and patch together my own system, which kept on falling apart. Then falling over, missing deadlines.”

She gave up the business. Not because she wanted to. Because the system left her no choice.

Maternal depression followed.

“I really struggled to get through. I loved motherhood, and I loved the fact that I finally got my baby and we can live this life, but it was just so many things I was battling against to try and navigate.”

When she looked into the research, she found Leeds University had documented how childcare in its current format is actually contributing to the gender pay gap. The system that’s supposed to support women is keeping a whole category of them back.

Her response: “My form of justice is to give people the means and the services and the spaces that they need to flourish.”

So she built Kindhaus. A coworking space with integrated childcare.

The practical details matter: speak to your community first. Find out what they actually need. Check Ofsted ratios—under-twos need 3.5 metres each. Partner with an existing childcare provider who already has a pedagogy. Start with half days. Prototype before you commit.

“Have the family days, invite the kids in, show people that you are family-friendly and just do those things that signal to people that it’s safe.”

The landlord story is brutal.

They found the perfect space—a former textile factory in Hackney. Negotiated for months. Got to the week of exchange.

And then the landlord decided he didn’t want kids in the outdoor space. Said it would be too noisy for other tenants.

“I ended up bursting out in tears because you’re carrying the weight of the world, everyone’s expectations, my hopes and ambitions.”

They lost all the legal fees. All the traction.

But they’re still going. Looking at new spaces. Learning from each blow.

“Not all landlords are ready for this new world where work and life are blended, and you have these blended solutions.”

But some are. And Ann-Marie found social investors who get it—people whose kids struggled with new parenthood, people running social impact funds who understand that “it takes time to create social impact, and that’s what they realised.”

The Pattern: Coworking Spaces as Laboratories for Democratic Reinvention

What connects a retrofit house in Birmingham, Peter Block’s small-group circles, and a coworking space with childcare in Hackney?

They’re all answering the same question Jon Alexander asks in his book Citizens.

What happens when we stop treating people as consumers—passive choosers between fixed options—and start treating them as citizens capable of shaping the options themselves?

Peter frames coworking spaces as “convening possibilities”—places where neighbours come to pursue what they care about. Safety. Livelihood. Health. Not just business.

Imandeep demonstrates that at the neighbourhood scale, you can bring together “artists, creatives, architects, neighbours, gardeners, growers, young people, educators, builders, trades folk, ceramics practitioners, people interested in biomaterials”—and have them thinking together about governance, tenure, climate risk, and the future value of being human.

Ann-Marie proves you don’t need Westminster to fix childcare. You need a prototype. A community that tells you what they need. And the stubbornness to keep going when landlords fail you.

The conventional coworking story says: optimise for convenience, monetise every square foot, scale quickly, exit faster.

These three are telling a different story.

Here’s the paradigm shift:

Your coworking space isn’t a business that happens to build community.

It’s civic infrastructure that happens to charge membership fees.

You’re not failing because you haven’t scaled. You’re building what the state and the market won’t provide—neighbourhood-level capacity for people to figure things out together.

The retrofit isn’t just for houses. It’s for democracy itself.

And it starts with asking different questions in the room you already have.

Who This Is For (And What You Get From Reading This)

If you run a space with fewer than 150 members and have been told you’re not a “real business” because you haven’t scaled—this piece just gave you the language to explain why that’s bollocks. Your space is civic infrastructure. Full stop.

If you’ve watched government programmes fail—Green Grants returning £500 million because of “lack of uptake” while your neighbours need warmer homes—you now know you’re not alone. And you have an alternative: neighbourhood-scale action, starting with the people already in your space.

If you’re a parent who’s patched together childcare and work and felt like you were failing at both, Ann-Marie’s story is your story. And her response (“My form of justice is give people the means and the services and the spaces that they need to flourish”) might be yours too.

If you’ve sat in meetings where someone promises to “get us out by 5:25” and wondered why efficiency matters more than connection, Peter just gave you the framework. Royal protocols keep us controlled. Common good protocols set us free.

Here’s what you walk away with:

One question to try this week: “Why was it important for you to be here today?”
One paradigm shift: Your coworking space isn’t a business that builds community. It’s civic infrastructure that charges membership fees.
One permission slip: You don’t need to scale. You need to go inch-wide, mile-deep with the people already in front of you.

The corporate coworking story says: be generic, appeal to everyone, grow fast.

That story has its place. But it’s not your story.

Your story is Imandeep’s: one house on one street, demonstrating what becomes possible when neighbours imagine together.

Your story is Peter’s: rearranging the room, breaking into small groups, asking, “What’s the crossroads you’re at?”

Your story is Ann-Marie’s: “My form of justice is to give people the means and the services and the spaces that they need to flourish.”

You don’t need venture capital to be civic infrastructure. You don’t need permission from Westminster. You don’t need the market to validate your model.

Your coworking space is already this infrastructure. You just might not have named it yet.

What You Can Do Monday Morning

Here’s the thing about this piece. You could read it, think “that’s inspiring,” and close LinkedIn.

Or you could try one thing this week.

Peter Block’s “heaven” moment came from one question. At a protest, organisers asked people to find four strangers and ask: “Why was it important for you to be here today?”

That’s it. No funding. No programme. One question.

Try this in your space:

Next time three or more people are in your space at the same time—maybe Tuesday morning, maybe during a lunch break—interrupt the silence. Say:

“I’ve been reading about this idea. Can we try something? Take 90 seconds and tell me: Why was it important for you to be here today?”

Then shut up and listen.

You might get awkward silence. You might get something that changes how you run your space forever.

Ann-Marie’s version: Before building KindHaus, she asked her community what they actually needed. Not what she assumed. What they said.

Your version: Pick three members this week. Ask them: “What’s one thing that would make this space work better for your life—not your work, your life?”

Imandeep’s version: “Inch-wide, mile-deep change.” One house. One street. One neighbourhood.

Your version: Instead of trying to serve everyone, pick ONE type of person your space could serve better than anyone else.

Parents?
Freelance writers?
People recovering from redundancy?

You can go deep with them.

The whole point of this piece in one line:

Democracy will be born in the back streets and the back homes. It won’t be born in Westminster.

Your coworking space IS the back street. Your members ARE the neighbours.

The infrastructure already exists. You’re sitting in it.

We’re Documenting Next from the Bullpen

The Unreasonable Connection Going Live! event 24th February 2026—150 coworking community builders gathering in London to talk citizenship, not consumerism.

We’re also tracking what’s happening with ACTionism screenings—coworking spaces hosting the documentary and then asking, “What do we build here?”

Example:

🐉Dragon Coworking, Rochester is hosting one on Wednesday, Jan 21, 2026 from 6 pm to 8 pm GMT

Followed by Natasha Boardman-Steer (Creatabot), facilitating a panel and open discussion with Rachael Carley (Carley Coaching), Tracey Errington (Thrift and Thrive) & Jatin Patel (Kalikas Armour) on the topic of Climate Change and Fast Fashion.

If you’re doing this work in your neighbourhood, we want to hear about it. The movement needs your stories.

Next Steps

1️⃣ Join Unreasonable Connection Going Live – February 24th 2026 in London. 150 community builders. One day of actual conversation. No speeches. Join the waitlist here.

2️⃣ Host an ACTionism Screening – The 25 documentary about finding your climate action crew. Show it in your space. Then ask: What do we build here?

3️⃣ Read 3ºC Neighbourhood, which is co-authored by CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs, on why we don’t have the carbon or material budget for current climate plans—and what neighbourhood-scale alternatives look like. Read 3ºC Neighbourhood on Medium

4️⃣ Try Common Good Protocols – Next time you gather people, skip the Q&A. Break into groups of 3-4. Ask: “Why was it important for you to be here today?” See what happens.

5️⃣ Connect with the people in today’s LinkedIn Show Notes:

Shout-out to the spaces already doing this work—hosting screenings, running community workshops, building what their neighbourhoods need.

You’re the ones actually building this. We’re just documenting it. When you start something, share it in the LinkedIn Coworking Group. The movement needs your story.

For example, Lewisham Change Makers on Thursday, 4th at BLUE GARAGE 💙 with Facework Group and Lewisham Council

Democracy Won’t Be Born in Westminster. It’s Being Built in Back Streets and Coworking Spaces.