Abstract
Coworking practices have proliferated around the world being embraced not only by remote workers, start-up employees and freelancers but also by larger organizations. Coworking spaces in public libraries, business districts and other urban spaces, herald profound changes for the way workspaces are used in cities. The study takes an integrative approach to investigate the economic and socio-cultural implications of coworking trend for smart cities, their ecosystems and the use of urban public spaces. The study examines these issues by studying motivations and challenges of providers and users of coworking spaces. Thirty coworking spaces in urban areas across Australia were studied and thirty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted with both providers and users of the coworking spaces. The findings suggest that coworking spaces play an important role in building communities and developing social and cultural ties. From urban space and environmental perspectives, coworking spaces are likely to contribute to urban mobility and sustainability. From an urban economic perspective, coworking spaces provide a collaborative environment and often a breeding ground for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is one of the most salient themes in the coworking spaces as found in this study. These findings will inform urban policy makers and help them better understand and tap into the source of civic entrepreneurship derived from coworking spaces.
Highlights
Public spaces in urban areas as part of urban planning and urban governance have attracted extensive research interest over the last 20 years from various perspectives (Ravazzoli and Torricelli, 2017)
The selection of Australia for the case study was mainly for three reasons: (1) Australia has been one of the leading countries in smart city transformation (KPMG, 2019); (2) Australia embraces a strong growth in coworking spaces (Cheung, 2018), with coworking spaces having grown by 297 to 309 per cent between 2013 and 2017, and the recent forecast estimates a tripling in coworking spaces by 2030 (Cheung, 2018); and (3) leading researchers have been intensively involved in smart city projects in Australia
Our findings show that coworking spaces contribute to collaboration, openness, and community engagement, which incidentally are the key elements of smart cities 2.0 (Trencher, 2019)
Summary
Public spaces in urban areas as part of urban planning and urban governance have attracted extensive research interest over the last 20 years from various perspectives (Ravazzoli and Torricelli, 2017). From a socio-cultural perspective, public spaces are considered places for social interaction, playing a central role in the creation of inclusive communities (Costamagna et al, 2019). Coworking spaces have been defined as ‘shared workspaces utilized by different sorts of knowledge professionals, mostly freelancers, working in various degrees of specialization in the vast domain of the knowledge industry’ The concept of contemporary coworking originated in 2005 in San Francisco, it is only in the past few years that co-working spaces have become a striking and visible feature of metropolitan (Gandini, 2015; Nathan, 2017). Coworking spaces, according to Bounchen et al (2018), generally have four distinct archetypes: the corporate, the open corporate, the consultancy, and the independent coworking spaces:
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