Let’s take a closer look at the scenarios emerging from the showcase campuses of platform companies.

California’s Silicon Valley has become the epicentre of attempts to structure not only global communication but also global communities. Facebook and its social network are a case in point: The company’s increased focus on Facebook groups as a unit of meaningful interaction is not primarily driven by economic valorisation based on likes of individual pages and the value generated by its own social network. Rather, the new engine powering the rhetoric of Facebook’s “global community” is the formulation of a model of society based on “meaningful” social interaction, and groups are the starting point for such a model.[1] Much has been written in architecture books and journals about the fusion of life and work on the corporate campuses of Facebook, Apple and Google and the particular value systems they project in terms of design: sketching a relaxed but professionally polished setting for like-minded people, the trope of the (post-university) campus suggests a place of encounters and innovation, a feel-good environment for an idealised community of knowledge workers, who in return for their willingness to spend endless hours working on-campus are being pampered with numerous perks such as unlimited food and drink supplies, fitness studios, onsite-healthcare, social programs and all kinds of other conveniences.[2]

Two significant planning characteristics distinguish the campus [Latin: plain or open field providing opportunities for action, gatherings and debates] from other urban quartiers and explain why it has become the favoured model for big employers in the new creative tech industries. One of its advantages is the ease with which large-scale workforces can be distributed across different buildings embedded in airy and welcoming surroundings. Yet while these settings play with the illusion of openness and transparency, they are most strongly defined by clearly set boundaries that separate life on campus from a very different world outside. This “bubble” effect of the campus is the foundation of its surge in popularity among investors in the technological frontier. Its elasticity is used as a safeguard to keep at bay unwelcome interruptions from the outside (whether uncontrolled intrusions, noise emissions or having to queue alongside “strangers”) without obstructing the potential for innovation-sparking chance encounters between employees.

Admittedly, Facebook’s Menlo Park campus on 1 Hacker Way has proved far from ideal in that respect, with one of its most apparent shortcomings lying precisely in the lack of a smooth, i.e. unnoticeable, management of the thresholds between inside and outside worlds. The bizarre positioning of a white billboard showing Facebook’s “Like” icon – the company’s only accessible onsite visitor attraction – in shades of blue at the intersection of Hacker Way and Bayfront Expressway, has become a much derided symbol of inaccessibility. The fact that Facebook fans, who might have travelled from afar, have to scramble through a thicket of overgrown vegetation to reach this much coveted signage, hoping to produce an Instagram-able selfie “at Facebook” while heavy trucks thunder past them on a nine-lane traffic corridor, makes it challenging to enact complicity with the company ethos.

Just a few yards away from the Like sign, Facebook’s private traffic wardens try to keep on top of the daily commuter chaos, turning unauthorised people away and directing employees to secure parking lots. Like other major Silicon Valley employers, Facebook has chartered a large fleet of unmarked black coaches, which shuttle staff from numerous locations across the Bay Area to Menlo Park in the morning and back again in the evening in order to soften the friction created by lengthy commutes and encourage employees to lose no time generating fresh ideas. However, the interaction between these private transport systems and the urban landscape surrounding Silicon Valley’s flagship campuses does not match the happy picture of an elevated work experience. Waiting between shifts, countless coaches can be seen parked up in the dusty no man’s land of disused byways, along the fences of electric substations and next to the ditches of irrigation canals, with only few of them managing to catch some shade under the canopies of rustling eucalyptus trees.