Today our team is admiring New York City’s skyline from a different perspective: Lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan Headquarters (LMHQ) is celebrating their opening with a 3-day #OFFSITE launch festival. It’s a collaborative space, a branch off of the now-familiar coworking model.
We got a hard-hat tour last week when the team was kind enough to open the doors for a soft-launch event to bring together some of New York City’s rich network of coworking and collaborative space organizers. Together with LMHQ’s Daria Siegel and the City of New York’s Economic Development Corporation’s Executive Vice President Eric Gertler and Senior Project Manager Pasha Gol, we brought together a meta-network of people who design and run the spaces in which we break down silos.
In under ten years, the number of coworking spaces in the city have proliferated. The growth of third-space venues has coincided with and supported parallel trends in shared workspaces, flexible office rentals, and using the web to connect with others around shared passions in real life (shout-out to NYC’s own Meetup for facilitating so much of that trend). More recently, these spaces are diversifying beyond remixing commercial real estate into more specialized areas, like social innovation spaces (Centre for Social Innovation, Impact Hub) and civic tech (Civic Hall). Entire neighborhoods that had no shared spaces within which to hack together now boast an array of options, like Silicon Harlem‘s beautiful, state-of-the-art mixed-use space. Our event was attended by leaders across the full range of place-based collaborative networks thriving in NYC, from civic entrepreneurs to food incubators to clean tech and local media production: Silicon Harlem, Staten Island Makerspace, the Made in NY Media Center, Neuehouse, NYC ACRE, Impact Hub NYC, Hot Bread Kitchen, the Urban Future Lab, the Centre for Social Innovation, Harlem Garage, Coworkrs, Katalyst Live, and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others.
Our hope in convening the conveners is that we can help weave together their projects, their innovation spaces, and their own rich networks throughout the city. Our plan is to continue getting together occasionally at each other’s spaces throughout the city. If you run a similar space, particularly one with a civic or social mission, please get in touch so we can keep you posted!