Planificación

Ziferblat’s space often gets contested even within the same functional frame. For instance, once I saw how a relatively small room in Tverskaya (two sofas and two tables with eight chairs) brought together two guests editing a radio programme (which involved playing the same fragments again and again on full volume), two other guests having a career advice meeting, and two more guests, working solo on their laptops. Nevertheless, throughout my fieldwork I neither witnessed any open confrontations between Ziferblat’s guests, nor did I see them expressing such signs of passive aggression as rolling eyes, raising eyebrows, or clicking tongue. By and large, most of them seemed to have perceived Ziferblat as a public good (Webster, 2002), or, to quote Pokrovka’s host Tanya again, as ‘everyone’s space’ (p. 118), where no

consumer has more ownership rights than another. However, Ziferblat’s architecture of homeyness often makes its guests perceive and use this space as more private than it was conceived to be. Most such misframings, testing the boundary between the public and private realms, are related to two practices—kissing and sleeping.

Although some hosts or even entire branches (Old Street) are overall more tolerant to kissing couples, all four teams share a common rule: if someone’s public display of affection makes people around uncomfortable, staff should intervene; as guests rarely complain to staff about each other’s behaviour, hosts are expected to judge whether they should intervene or not from their own feelings about what they see. Sleeping, however, is a more subtle biopolitical issue. Pokrovka and Tverskaya, open until 6 a.m. on weekends, despite allowing their guests to snooze, are trying to avoid being labelled as a ‘crash pad’:162_{‘It’s not really welcome… I mean, we don’t say: “Go ahead, get}

some sleep”, but when someone dozes off, we don’t bother them, we even cover them with a blanket’ (Nikita, op. cit. interview). Although daytime napping is less stigmatised

162 _{This policy roots back to Treehouse, which was often misframed by its visitors as something between}

a squat and a free hostel. As Mitin emphasised in one media interview, ‘It’s not a squat, nobody lives here, we don’t let anyone stay overnight’ (Varlamov, 2011). However, many non-Ziferblat anti-cafes that operate around the clock not only allow but even encourage their guests (predominantly students) to

in staff’s eyes, they distinguish between what sociologist Simon Williams (2007) calls ‘socially attentive’ sleepers, remaining ‘within the norms of interactional propriety in public places by sleeping without complete loss of bodily control, deference or

demeanour’ (p. 319), and ‘inconsiderate’ ones, ethically and aesthetically challenging Ziferblat’s publicness and civility:

If someone just naps in an armchair, it’s totally fine. But if someone takes off their shoes, spreads themselves over the space, moves the furniture, lays down, starts snoring—it’s quite uncomfortable to everyone. (Tanya, Pokrovka’s host, interview, July 2016)

There was a guest who bought a monthly pack,163 _{he’d been coming here}

every single day for a couple of months and he would sleep all day long. It turned out that he had some housing issues, and we felt so sorry for him at first—poor thing… besides, he bought the pack. But then we realised that he always sleeps in central rooms, exposing his belly and whatnot… And we just said: ‘Sorry, dude, you’ve had enough sleep, you can’t do it here anymore’ (Maya, Tverskaya’s branch manager, July 2016).

Old Street’s team, initially very keen on providing a snoozing space to their guests, eventually faced the same dilemma between homeyness and publicness. As the branch manager explained, their ‘secret hide-away room’ used to be positioned as a napping/meditation room for those exhausted with London’s working culture (one of the hosts donated a couch bed for these purposes), but after a while it was decided that,

…it’s not a very good practice for us… taking a nap for 15 minutes is okay, but sleeping in Ziferblat… we’re not a flat, after all. We are a public place and we should stick to… we are licenced as an office, as a public place, so we can’t afford a bedroom. Even in the daytime. (Alex, interview, November 2016)

As a result, this room was reframed into a ‘Skype room’ and, later, a ‘workshop’, where one could do some work alone or have a private talk. Nevertheless, the couch, moved to the main space, remained a popular napping site (there was an afternoon when I saw a guest sleeping on her back, having all her body covered with a blanket, which is quite different from the traditional choreography of sleep in public places).

In Edge Street, the issue of public sleeping took yet another interesting turn. Inspired with their marketing director’s story about people coming there specifically for power naps (Ben, interview, September 2016) and exhausted after a long week of commuting to Manchester from Warwickshire, I happened to test Edge Street’s sleeping etiquette myself:

I’m sitting at a table, trying to keep my eyes open, but cannot help it anymore, so I move to the sofa, sit down and immediately doze off. I wake up in about half an hour and go to the kitchen to make some tea; while the kettle is heating up, I’m having a chat with a host. She says: ‘I didn’t know

whether I should wake you up or not but Tracey [the manager] explained that you are here for research [meaning that I didn’t have to pay]. She said you were probably just tired and told me not to bother you‘. It feels a bit weird—did I do something wrong? Later Tracey comes to my sofa to say goodbye as she’s done for today; I bring up the nap situation, we both laugh, then I ask how often that happens; she says it’s quite common here and then adds: ‘There was a guest who dozed off and then, after realising how much time he spent here, he refused to pay’. (Fieldnotes, February 2017)

As this situation demonstrates, Edge Street’s tariff sets limitations to the idea of home, or, more specifically, to such an important component of it as ‘the possibility of taking [one’s] time’ (Hall, 2009: 84)—instead of releasing themselves from ‘time-space rhythms of capitalist development’ (Lambert, 2013: 2), many guests of this branch end up feeling ‘on the clock’.164

Before concluding this discussion of the ambiguous relationship between the public and the private in Ziferblat, I shall mention one more way in which this dialectic manifests itself. Unlike Old Street and Edge Street, offering the option of private booking from the very beginning, Pokrovka and Tverskaya, albeit recognising it as a possible source of profit, refused to rent the space out for private events until about 2016, as that would have made it unavailable to the public, even if for just one evening (eventually, Tverskaya made all of its rooms hireable; Pokrovka rents out only the ‘library’ but never the main space). The next section will continue the analysis of the clashes between social ethos and commercial logic in Ziferblat in the context of food.

5.3. Sweets and bitters: Ziferblat’s multifunctionality through the

lens of food

Food practices—provisioning, production and exchange—have long been recognised as a ‘cornerstone of culture and social organisation’ (Watson and Klein, 2016: 2). Despite Mitin’s initial intention to de-emphasise the role of eating and drinking in favour of socialising, work, cultural and home-from-home activities, it was precisely food practices and relations that he placed at the centre of his social experiment, seeking to turn consumers into participants. This section will outline the development of Ziferblat’s food practices and explore the ways in which they shape power relations between staff and customers; it will then conclude with the discussion of some food-related legal issues that might impede the development of the post-functionalist framework.

164 _{According to Edge Street’s team, the average time spent in the venue is 87 minutes. From my limited}

observations in 2016–2017, it felt like most visits were even shorter than that (my fieldnotes from Edge Street are full of comments on how people constantly come and go and how difficult it is to catch a