Problem
If you spend eight hours of your day at work, and eight hours at home, there is no reason why your workplace should be any less of a community than your home.
Solution
Build or encourage the formation of work communities—each one a collection of smaller clusters of workplaces which have their own courtyards, gathered round a larger common square or common courtyard which contains shops and lunch counters. The total work community should have no more than 10 or 20 workplaces in it.
Related Patterns
… according to the pattern Scattered Work (9), work is entirely decentralized and woven in and out of the housing areas. The effect of Scattered Work (9) can be increased piecemeal, by building individual work communities, one by one, in the boundaries between the neighborhoods; these work communities will then help to form the boundaries — Subculture Boundary (13), Neighborhood Boundary (15) — and above all in the boundaries, they will help to form Activity Nodes (30).
Make the square at the heart of the community a public square with public paths coming through it Small Public Squares (61); either in this square, or in some attached space, place opportunities for sports — Local Sports (72); make sure that the entire community is always within three minutes’ walk of an Accessible Green (60); lay out the individual smaller courtyards in such a way that people naturally gather there — Courtyards Which Live (115); keep the workshops small — Self-Governing Workshops and Offices (80); encourage communal cooking and eating over and beyond the lunch counters — Street Cafe (88), Food Stands (93), Communal Eating (147) …
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 222.