Dismissed as a trophy project for David Cameron’s Big Society, a bold new plan by Architecture 00:/ aims to take the workspaces of the future to London’s East End

There is perhaps nothing more abhorrent to the creative startup sector than being co-opted by central government. Since its dubious inception, the Big Society has progressively piggybacked on existing initiatives and crushed them in the process – official endorsement by the coalition sounding the death-knell to any sense of independent vitality.

So, as David Cameron announced plans to invest £50m in a "visionary project" to regenerate the Old Street roundabout at the heart of east London's "Tech City cluster" last week, it should have come as no surprise that the reaction was less than warm.

"As well as backing the businesses of today, we are creating an aspiration nation and also backing the innovative, high-growth businesses of the future," Cameron proclaimed at the LSE's Urban Age conference on Thursday. "That's why we're investing in creating the largest civic space in Europe – a place for startup companies and the local community to come together and become the next generation of entrepreneurs."

The vision is the work of Architecture 00:/ (pronounced "zero zero"), a practice that operates in the blurry territory between buildings and strategic design. It describes the project, which it initiated as a speculative proposition, as a "civic commons" – a kind of physical manifestation of the online, open-source realm.

"It will be a building providing workshop spaces, exhibition spaces, event-hosting, free workspaces, education and innovation-accelerators," says the practice. "In short, a low-threshold point of entry for everyone – from the international investor to the London teenager who wants the opportunity to turn their idea into a startup."

Big picture … some of the spaces that might take residence. Image: Architecture 00:/

Presented with a shiny Photoshopped vision of a glowing box perched on the roundabout, it was all too easily perceived as No 10 muscling into an area that is already thriving, without the helping hand of a Big Society trophy project.

Richard Sennett, professor at the LSE and guru of informal urban vitality, was one of the first to pour scorn, as Building Design reported this week:

"When the prime minister and mayor announced there will now be a dedicated space for creativity I thought, 'this area is now over'," he told the Urban Age conference. "The idea of building a place where we put all the tech people contravenes why that area grew up in the first place. The reason the area is a centre for innovation already is that most of the firms that are here weren't meant to be here. It was somewhere planners never expected them to go."

Telegraph blogger Willard Foxton joined the chorus: "The government should be listening to the local successful entrepreneurs, not throwing money at art projects designed by parasites."

Such healthy scepticism over this top-down branding of the "Silicon Roundabout" is welcome and inevitable – but it obscures the fact that there might actually be more to the initiative.

At the heart of 00:/'s proposals is a fundamental question about the nature of public space. East London has been fertile ground for many recent experiments in public realm design – from wayfinding paving stones to trees in roads – and Old Street has its own award-winning promenade of circular benches and lighting by Tonkin Liu. But nothing has yet tested how civic space could be used as a site of production.

"Ultimately these spaces don't offer more than shops and coffee," says Alastair Parvin of 00:/. "We're trying to move the public space conversation on beyond consumption. The project is about extending the commons, to include cheap and low-cost workspaces, labs, fabrication tools – making production part of the public realm."

Behind the screens … a look inside the civic commons. Image: Architecture 00:/

The project for the roundabout is only at early feasibility stages, with an architectural competition likely to come further down the road, but outline plans suggest a vast covered area, with a Henman Hill-style amphitheatre, as well as workshops for drop-in fabrication – similar to Manchester's successful Fab Lab model.

"Right now, everyone's talking about 3D printers," says Parvin. "But the important thing is this is a piece of infrastructure that has to change and adapt over the next 10 years. It could have wet labs and sandboxing capabilities, where you can beta-test products – all those resources that small companies can't afford to have in-house."

Proposed to be run by its users, as a community interest company, the project is an experiment in providing a new kind of institutional space, seen to be lacking in the East End.

"We know how to do traditional hierarchical institutions, and we know how to do online peer-to-peer stuff," says Parvin, "but how can we make an organisational structure that will remain open and not become exclusive? That's the design challenge."

"In the 19th and 20th centuries, the likes of Carnegie did it with public libraries, making books available to all," he says, describing the proposal as something of an open-source university. "It's too simplistic to write off any capital-led project as edifice-building – investment in universities was not discarded as 'top-down meddling'."

Critics fear the proposal will only serve to accelerate the rapid rise of rents in the area, further pricing out the kinds of companies it is intended to serve – as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel rush to join the party. While this is a real danger, there is every possibility that this kind of space might help the smaller startups thrive – an island of accessible civic commons in an area increasingly dominated by the bigger corporations. However it evolves, it is a brave experiment in a new kind of productive public realm, bringing the open source, collaborative constitution of the online world into physical, built reality.