In Search of Community: An Anthropologist’s Experience at SPACE4

I arrived in London from Canada with the intention of doing anthropological fieldwork with progressive communities inside the tech industry. I knew I would not get the levels of immersion that anthropologists – many from Britain – experienced a century ago when they went to far off lands and lived in village huts. But I thought some contemporary urban version of it could be possible if I figured out a way to meet people organically, which you think would be easy in one of the world’s most storied megacities. Turns out, in a post-pandemic world, finding a place where likeminded people – who valued community and the exchange of ideas – regularly brushed up against each other was immensely difficult. Despite having learned to figure out a way to navigate communities in several other big Global North cities where I did not know anyone, the online-ness of the people I came to talk to was making me question my choice of moving to London.

A chance introduction to SPACE4 and the enthusiastic encouragement of Maddy, Natasha, and Polly changed that. Initially, SPACE4 helped me find some grounding in a city where it’s so easy to get lost in the crowd. Then it led to a series of fortuitous connections that were in turns interesting, fruitful, or absolutely essential to my project. There were also many times when I was lost and stuck in my own thought processes at my desk, and then went to the kitchen to refill my coffee mug, and happened to have a conversation whose effect could range all the way from putting me in a lighter mood to providing an important new direction for my work. I learned so much from the wonderful group of people who’ve found their way here, the thoughtfulness and range of the events, and the very culture of the place. SPACE4 both reminds me of a time in the past where other modes of urban sociality was possible and of a future-oriented-present that acknowledges the need to build new forms of copresence.

– Muntasir Chowdhury