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Zurich, March 2025
L200 | projects
Panayotis Antoniadis in the L200 3min video teaser prepared for Urbanize! festival 2020
A viable system (VSM) is any system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment, and a prime feature is adaptability. The L200 was co-designed in multiple flexible ways, enabling it to adapt to various challenges during its seven years of existence. From this perspective, what design features would you include as being critical in a blueprint for grassroots living labs of the L200 type?
L200 being a common space shared by many individuals and organizations has survived big shocks because of its “layered sustainability” model. At its core the L200 association is purely non-profit and independent, as all work for its operation and management is 100% voluntary and no subsidies have been received. Its operation cost is covered 100% by the membership fees and low rents for various uses, and until now the net balance has been always close to zero. L200 engages in non-commercial activities, not even selling beers or coffee as many autonomous spaces do to survive, but the association does not put any limit to the activities of its members when using the space. The L200 is a common infrastructure “on top” of which members can use and develop their own sustainability/viability models.
At present L200 is transitioning to a decentralised organization through five clusters of use. What concerns is this measure addressing?
Due to its frugality in the effort put in running the space, L200 has had a somewhat obscure communication toward the public (“was ist das?” / “what is it?” was its motto from the beginning), and a high concentration of the management tasks to a few people. The introduction of these five clusters, first clears a little the L200’s identity while keeping it diverse. Second, giving more freedom to clusters to communicate about uses and activities, and holding them responsible for hosting the corresponding events and external requests, enables the emergence of new actors who can take care of the space, and feel a significant level of ownership and commitment. This eventually will lead to the wider sharing of the management and maintenance tasks.
According to the viable system model theory (Beer 1984) a complex organization is more capable of responding to a changing and unpredictable environment, if (a) it consists of subsidiary organizations that are agile, effective, self-contained and (b) highly interconnected, and (c) they operate cohesively, having a common ethos and purpose, enabled by shared processes and technologies. Is that applying to how you imagine the clusters functioning at L200?
As mentioned above, the first point (a) resonates a lot with the idea behind the L200 clusters and the process to achieve this objective is under way. My personal conviction is that interconnection between such autonomous organizations should be based on a few very clear and strict rules that allow the maximum level of independence and freedom, as the network engineers call them “constraints that deconstrain.” Until now we had such rules that helped the coordination between more than 300 members. If from now the five clusters will create a hierarchy, maybe some additional rules should be implemented, e.g., on the responsibilities of the cluster coordinators vis-a-vis external users that use the space without being members. Or rules regarding the usage of space-time slots belonging to another cluster’s “priority slots”.
From the VSM perspective, a complex organisation has multiple levels of nested organisations, each adhering to the above principles. Do you have such expectations from the L200 organization in the future? In what ways?
I don’t expect too many levels, since L200 is a small space and has a limit of people being active in it. But it is totally conceivable that the individual clusters could operate internally with a similar structure, but not necessary.
If managers have the capacity to guide others’ actions, from your perspective what do effective leaders do in an organization?
I don’t consider myself neither a manager nor a leader, so it is difficult to answer this question. In the case of L200 I have a leading role, being the president and overall coordinator, so it is difficult also to deny it. My main passion is the definition of fair and simple rules that frame the actions of everyone in a collective through mutual consent, without explicit management but rather through leadership by example, and I have been doing a lot of this at L200. Related to the sharing of the overall effort I have failed to delegate tasks and in the last years I was doing most of the organizational tasks including accounting, communication, reservations, hosting, sometimes even cleaning. The way to change this situation was also through setting frameworks and exercising agreed upon rules, and not through explicit assignment of tasks.
You have been the manager at L200 for seven years. How do you define leadership from your experience? Do you approach leadership tasks as experiments?
The most challenging task of a manager, and in my case the management of L200 is responsibility. The stress that we cannot pay the rent and long-term projects will need to be cancelled, that someone will come to the space for an important event and the door is closed or someone else is hosting another important event at the same time. And somewhat, yes, [with a provocative attitude] I have been experimenting with ways to keep the commitment and responsibility as low as possible while the space survives. Refusing to get any reimbursement for my work even if it was proposed, but preferring to minimize effort and risk taking, it is part of this experiment. […]
If leadership is a transformative process that focuses on practical experiments, what situations that demand activity and discovering along the way did you create?
We have been testing different levels and types of commitment, starting with the spaceholder concept, which is now extended to the idea of a cluster group. There has been quite some experimentation on allowing various forms of “encounters” between different groups, even through objects left in the space, facilitation as basic as passing the key from one user to another, and activities taking place in parallel in the same space-time.
What minimal structures have you been creating to maximise autonomy?
I would highlight three rules: non-domination, covering “just” the rent costs, and non-curation. To explain the non-curation rule, which is easy to “claim” but the most difficult to implement -- and many do in theory, but not in practice --, I often say this story to people that ask about the space: Artists come often and want to organize a gallery event or a concert, and their first move is to show me their pictures or music, and I immediately close my eyes (or ears) and say that I am not allowed to see their work, because I don’t want to be tempted to have an opinion about it, and so any responsibility. If anyone asks “why did you accept this type of work to be displayed at L200?” I would reply "I didn't know.”
Within moments of transformation, did you facilitate incremental reorientation by encouraging repetition (comfort zone) and moments of gradual insight?
We have tried a lot to encourage regular uses without domination, which is a subtle task. The clusters are exactly an effort to engage people that use the space regularly and create a strong relationship with it. Another area of continuous transformation and reorientation is the space itself and its objects. One of the most important lessons throughout these years has been the attachment of people with objects and the importance that bringing a new object in the L200 space could have. The management of this object has been a very challenging and delicate operation, with moments of clearing and then allowing the “repetition” of filling the space again, every time with more strict constraints. The not very strict policy regarding objects left at L200 has been historically a means to allow some overflow of “information” between the different space users. We didn’t want to offer a completely “empty” space, a white cube, but there were always some “leftovers” from previous usages for people to get in contact with the diversity of the space.
Do you have examples of probs and prompts that you sent to spark conversation and get activity going?
In the early days we tried various things with the MAZI zone, but not really successful. The “Was ist das?” has been perhaps the most successful prob, if I understand the term, it was prominent on the boards at the entrance, and over time became more of an “internal” joke. It was during Covid that we made a big effort with a video teaser and interviews of members to answer this question and get in touch with each other. Perhaps also our new flyer that we distributed for the first time beyond L200 was an effective prob.
If innovative managers create interpretive environments, in which others can make meaningful contributions, what new directions have you imagined for the space, group, governance?
L200 has been for a long time an extremely diverse group that had limited contact, and I was in the privileged position to experience all this diversity. A new direction is to give this opportunity to more people. Also to appreciate and feel comfortable with small events: “When two people meet for the first time at L200, it is an event.”
Have you prepared for serendipity by deliberately breaking a routine?
In my opinion, serendipity is prepared when there is empty space, L200 is a space that is not “full” but waits often patiently for something to happen. And it often does, always when you stop waiting consciously. Creating space for the unexpected, requires patience with low levels of activity, and a stable presence without expectations. During Covid, we had to imagine usages of the space that do not bring many people inside, like the NetRoom, which included the 7at7.digital broadcasting series.
How did you link the familiar with new occurrences? Did the adjusting to unanticipated happen at L200 by reframing previous material?
The Covid restructuring was one situation that we needed to reframe the space based on what was available. But in L200 we are in a continuous transformation since many individuals and groups with strong presence have left the space, and others are entering. The fact that the barrier to enter and exit is very low, and given that we operate at the “cost” level, big exits create perturbations. In many cases it was just a random passerby entering to ask “what is this?” that has provided an urgent solution. So, I would say that waiting patiently without trying too hard to bring new people has been a very important element of the L200 survival. My role has been to welcome the surprises coming from the outside, and integrate them without many questions and barriers. A good example is the street artist, who entered one day from the street. Tomek liked the space and we offered him an informal artist residency. As an exchange he painted our boards, and also brought many objects in the space, which we allowed, and over time gave away most of them, but some “survived”.
What L200 strengths have you been counting on?
Centrality and diversity by construction, with the diverse group that co-initiated L200, and low-cost management without expectations are the most important L200 strengths. The high rental cost (which is actually not exceptionally high for this centrality) has been in my opinion a strength rather than a weakness, making the need for cooperation between many actors a survival need. If receiving subsidies, it would likely have to deal with more conflicts and territorial “protection.” Then the low fees required could be criticized as exclusion means, but with the “layered sustainability” model L200 allows for a “layered solidarity” model, empowering its spaceholders to support other organizations without means to use the space.