Coworking neu [nòi]

On 27 January 2012 we opened a coworking space inside the former stables of Palazzo Castrofilippo, an 18th-century noble palace in the heart of the Kalsa. It wasn't a business move in the traditional sense — it was a collective answer to the employment crisis of those years, built on the idea that a shared space could be a tool for solidarity before it was ever a service to sell.

We've called ourselves a civic infrastructure ever since, a Social Operating System: a place where professional work generates relational capital, not just income. We like to describe ourselves through the image of a tree — roots as the bond with the neighbourhood, branches as the network of relationships we build, leaves as the people who, every day, bring their own resources into something shared.

The model runs on do-ocracy: whoever acts, decides. Instead of a cash membership fee, every member commits 60 hours a year of volunteering — hosting, upkeep, project work. To make that care work visible and traceable, we introduced NEU, a complementary social currency that recognises reciprocity between members. The result: the coworking now generates close to 4,000 hours of volunteering a year, partly managed through the app we built ourselves.

But the heart of the space isn't the internet connection — "the optical fiber is fast, but the moka should stay slow, as it's supposed to be." The heart is the shared kitchen: a non-commercial meeting point where whoever works here, Italian or foreign, sits at the same table. Tea and coffee are always free — the only rule is to drink them together. The slow, communal lunches, often cooked by whoever happens to be around, are what actually feeds every other initiative the association runs.

Over fourteen years we've grown from 12 to 32 desks, gone through the 2017 flex turn — self-built folding tables that let us empty the room in minutes for events, exhibitions or courses — and the post-Covid expansion of 2023, when hybrid work brought new demand for shared space. In 2025 we hired our first part-time employee, a step our growing project portfolio finally made possible without touching the self-funded model we've held onto since day one.

ZERO, Sementor, Orbita, and everything else we run today, grew out of this space and the culture that lives in it — they're the fruit of this tree, not the other way around. Walk into 64 via Alloro for the first time and you won't find a shared office. You'll find a community that, for 14 years, has kept choosing "we."