Where is Work?

Explore the shifting geography of work in 2025, from nomad hubs to virtual offices, and how infrastructure, not place, now anchors collaboration, culture, and organisational identity.

In the old world of work, geography was simple. You had an office. The office had an address, a commute, and a floor plan. Work happened within its walls, measured by time spent at desks and proximity to colleagues. The place defined the practice. An organisation’s culture was embedded in physical architecture: open-plan layouts signalled collaboration, corner offices signalled hierarchy, water coolers signalled informal exchange. Where you worked was not just a location, it was an anchor of identity and routine.

Fast-forward to 2025, and that anchor has loosened. Work can now happen in a café in Lisbon, a coworking space in Bangalore, a spare bedroom in London, or on a train moving between them. Slack channels stand in for corridors; Zoom calls mimic meeting rooms; Notion or Confluence act as filing cabinets. The geography of work has dissolved into a lattice of physical dispersal and digital overlay. The office no longer dictates the terms of work; platforms and bandwidth do.

This dispersal has been hailed as liberation. Digital nomadism promises freedom from borders. Hybrid models promise the best of both worlds. Virtual offices promise cost savings and flexibility. The mythology of the tethered desk has been replaced by the gospel of work-from-anywhere. Yet this freedom comes with new questions: when work is everywhere, what holds it together? If collaboration happens across time zones, and corporate culture is mediated by screens, what infrastructure anchors trust, cohesion, and accountability?

The geography of work, once obvious, is now contested terrain. Some organisations cling to physical offices as cultural anchors. Others experiment with fully virtual models, replacing real estate with digital platforms. Governments issue nomad visas while cities transform cafés into coworking hubs. Workers themselves oscillate between enthusiasm for mobility and nostalgia for the stability of place.

Beneath the enthusiasm lies a structural dilemma: work may no longer be place-bound or time-bound, but it still requires infrastructure, both digital and social, to function.

The question, then, is not simply where work is, but what infrastructure allows it to exist when place dissolves. The future of work is not the death of geography, but its reconfiguration.

In this issue of Brewed for Work, we trace the shifting geography of labour in 2025. From digital nomads with global visas to hybrid teams anchored by coworking hubs and fully virtual offices run on platforms, work has escaped the traditional boundaries of place. Yet mobility does not abolish the need for infrastructure. We explore what anchors culture, collaboration, and trust when the office dissolves, and how work’s new geographies reshape the very idea of organisation.

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Today’s Issue at a Glance:

• The Death (and Afterlife) of the Office

• Nomads, Natives, and Hybrids?

• Virtual Workscapes

• The Limits of Displacement

• Towards Anchored Fluidity

So grab your favourite mug, and let's get brewing!

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For most of modern history, the geography of work was stable. Offices, factories, and shops tethered labour to place. Work happened at a designated site; workers arrived, clocked in, performed tasks, and clocked out. The physical space was more than a backdrop—it structured collaboration, reinforced hierarchy, and gave coherence to organisational identity. Even knowledge work, which relied less on machinery and more on ideas, took shape within buildings whose walls contained not only desks and filing cabinets but also shared routines and rituals.

The pandemic disrupted this equilibrium, accelerating a transformation already underway.

Remote work, once an exception, became mainstream almost overnight. As restrictions eased, the landscape did not revert to its old form. Instead, hybrid models emerged, allowing employees to split time between home and office. Simultaneously, digital nomadism gained momentum, as workers with laptops, cloud accounts, and stable internet connections realised that their labour was no longer tethered to a single city or even a single country. Meanwhile, virtual offices, platforms that replicate organisational functions in purely digital environments, gained legitimacy as companies sought to reduce costs and embrace flexibility.

By 2025, the question “where is work?” has no singular answer.

For some, it remains in high-rise towers or coworking hubs. For others, it stretches across continents, time zones, and devices. Work has become not a place, but a network of practices sustained by infrastructure; digital platforms for communication and coordination, legal frameworks for cross-border employment, and cultural anchors that preserve coherence in the absence of walls. Geography has dissolved, but infrastructure has grown more complex.

This shift carries both promise and tension. Flexibility allows workers to design lives around mobility, family, or personal preference. Organisations can access global talent pools and reduce real estate costs. Yet the loss of physical anchors raises questions about cohesion, trust, and identity. Can a Slack channel replace the serendipity of hallway conversations? Can culture be sustained without shared rituals embedded in space? What happens when collaboration stretches across time zones, where “the office” is always open but no one is ever fully present?

The geography of work, in short, has not disappeared, it has reconfigured.

To understand this reconfiguration, we must look not only at the movement of people but at the infrastructure—digital, social, and legal—that enables work to exist without fixed place. The answer to “where is work?” lies not in geography, but in the architectures that hold dispersed labour together.

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