Welcome to Facebookville
Facebook plans to expand its Menlo Park headquarters to include a complex of 1,500 homes, with shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, parks, hotels and all the elements and infrastructure of a small town for its workforce, to be called Willow Campus.
Completion of the project is set for 2021, and is intended as a way to alleviate one of the main problems the company’s employees face in the San Francisco Bay area: housing costs have soared. The large number of technology companies paying higher than average salaries and that in many cases include include payment of all or part of the cost of rent,, have led to rampant gentrification: neighborhoods that only a few years ago were no-go zones are today beyond the reach of people on normal salaries.
Facebook is offering housing for its workers close to their workplace: about 225 apartments, 15% of the total, would be offered for rent at prices lower than those on the market, presumably to company employees. Others may be offered on the open market, although details are still unclear. Neither is it clear whether the office space would be for Facebook’s exclusive use or if it would be offered to other companies. In addition, Facebook is investing tens of millions of dollars in improvements of Route 101, which suffers from traffic jams that can lead to remarkably high travel times.
What Facebook is designing is, to all intents and purposes, a small city, as can be seen in the video presentation: more than 160,000 square meters of offices, 1,500 homes, almost 12,000 square meters of commercial area, a mall, a cultural center, a hotel and a visitor center: “Facebookville”, who knows, perhaps there will even be a statue of its founder… riding a horse? :-) This is way ahead of what other big companies have designed for their corporate headquarters: we could be moving from spaces where tens of thousands of employees work and who will now live there.
The idea of providing an employee not only with a job, but also a home in the vicinity of it seems, in principle, extremely practical: a city design carried out by a company like Facebook would not neglect key infrastructures such as bandwidth or transport systems. These workers could find themselves living in a bubble in which many of the interactions of their daily life would adapt to their circumstances. In terms of attracting and retaining talent, tech companies would be able to offer an unmatched immersive experience, an all-in-one solution for people whose careers otherwise would be made much more difficult.
Where might such models lead, what problems, advantages or disadvantages generate? My experience in Saudi Arabia, a country that is creating new cities from scratch, leads me to think that the gains in efficiency when building a city from scratch are potentially enormous, to the point of rethinking many of the problems of everyday life in traditional cities. Is Facebook starting a trend toward the development of “corporate cities” that offer their workers a better life than they have known in cities so far? Could you see yourself living in a city owned by the company you work for?
(En español, aquí)
