Time.news – From smart working, practiced from home, to smart working from any city where you can find us or even move. And the new e-residency trend for digital nomads. Inspired by the Tulsa remote working project, the new course took off in the United States in the middle of the lockdown era, in Tulsa, the second largest city in the state of Oklahoma, the 47th most populous in the United States, which has appealed to workers remotely to relocate: “We will pay you to work from Tulsa”, the motto, offering at the beginning $ 10,000 as a lump sum to encourage, for example, the purchase of a house.
Since the start of the pandemic, Tulsa has registered over 10,000 applications for relocation to be able to go to work in conditions deemed advantageous within a community that provides coworking spaces and provides job opportunities and collaborations with other local entrepreneurs. “I have a three year old son and it was really good for him and our family to be here. We are able to afford a bigger place to live. We have a backyard to play in. And some of these things we couldn’t afford in California have made it easier to do here in Tulsa, ”said Stefania Lloyd, Santa Barbara, event coordinator, in one of the many testimonials posted on the site.
Along the same lines, starting last December the Venice Foundation, an organization for the protection of the city’s cultural heritage, and the University of Ca ‘Foscari promoted the “Venywhere” project to encourage the spread of a new residential model in the lagoon city. linked, in particular, to the so-called anywhere workers, workers from everywhere and at the same time from nowhere in particular, with the aim of fighting or, at least, stemming the depopulation of the city which has reached its historical minimum of inhabitants: 50 thousand against 174,000 from the 1950s. And thus reverse the residential decline by promoting a form of urban repopulation with workers willing to move to the lagoon for a period of time: from a minimum of six months to a year and even more, the hidden wish.
In fact, the promoters of “Venywhere” believe that Venice is an ideal laboratory for experimenting and encouraging new methods of work and residence by spending more time there than just a simple vacation.. Even Florence, in the course of April a year ago, launched a similar program and the hope is that the cities of art that are more dependent on mass tourism and the phenomenon of gentrification can redeem themselves, enriching themselves with new energies by activating a offering new services and economic opportunities for the local community.
The phenomenon of remote work has in fact now become an important and irreversible component of the new global job landscape after Covid-19 and its variants, and at the same time offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the role of cities and their own organization. attracting businesses and skilled workers. On the website of the Venice Foundation it can in fact be read that often “they are ‘knowledge workers’ who in historic cities like Venice can transform themselves into a specific category of temporary residents, the more numerous the more perfected are the devices made available for ” identification of functional homes to their particular needs.
This specific category of residents creates a new dimension in housing dynamics, revitalizing and strengthening the demand for services of ‘ordinary’ residents “, so that the presence of these workers” can be strategic for the consolidation of neighborhood, artisanal, commercial and service in the strict sense, also contributing to their development “.
As for Venice, the project will start at full capacity from next September but a pilot phase of experimentation will take place in collaboration with Cisco, a world leader in technologies enabling innovative work methods. Sixteen employees of the San Josè company in California, coming from different European countries, will in fact test this new experience for three months, experimenting not only with the functionality of the “Venywhere” platform and the impact that the whole initiative could have on the city of Venice, including the technologies of the future of work and all forms of collaboration between the people and teams that are distributed there.
Active for just a few weeks, the “Venywhere” platform has already registered the interest of over 15,000 people with over 1,200 worker registrations available for transfer in the lagoon to open up to a new way of working and living in a new city like Venice, active and at the same time engaging. Thirty-forty-year-olds mostly from the US and Northern Europe willing to be based in the city for a six-month base period. But the Venice Foundation hopes that they will also be able to stay and thus create a new colony of residents. According to a slogan: “Workers from anywhere”, workers from anywhere.