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Paper short abstract

Examining Cluj's coworking spaces as infrastructure for the remote creative class, this ethnography reveals the precarity behind the freedom rhetoric. It explores how workers navigate digital mobility and physical anchoring through neoliberal practices.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decade, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) has aggressively rebranded itself as a "creative city," attracting a flux of digital nomads and remote workers within a polarized urban landscape. While remote work enables mobility, it often generates a counter-desire for physical "anchoring" and community. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with freelancers and entrepreneurs in Cluj, this paper examines coworking spaces not merely as offices, but as nodes of ideological dissemination where the tension between mobility and immobility is navigated.

I argue that these spaces function as paradoxes: they promise a return to community while actively facilitating the neoliberal subjectivation of the worker. The paper analyzes how the entrepreneurship of the self becomes a prerequisite for inhabiting these spaces. Furthermore, I critically reconstruct the chain of precarity obscured by the visual rhetoric of creative freedom.

Workers navigate this precarious landscape by transforming social relations into social capital, using the coworking space to stabilize their professional identity. By looking at how subjects align their values with the dominant logic of competition and self-branding, I explore whether coworking spaces offer genuine possibilities for resilient community-making or if they merely serve as transient stations that reproduce the polarizations of the neoliberal economy. The research thus highlights how the immobile infrastructure of the coworking hub shapes, and extracts value from, the mobile imaginaries of the contemporary workforce.