Who Has the Right to the Coworking Space? Reframing Platformed Workspaces as Elite Territory in the Geomedia City

Abstract

Current research suggests that coworking spaces (CWS) both respond to and legitimize work precarization. This is an important critique. Less acknowledged, however, is the fact that CWS also (re)produce eliteness. Thus, to the aim of offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in CWS research, I here scrutinize CWS as promotors of class privilege. I build my case on the premise that class privilege has to do with more than merely economic superiority and seek to dismantle, in particular, the role of geomedia technologies in the (re) production of CWS eliteness. With clues derived from a literature review as well as analyses of real-life cases, I here recognize CWS as places of elite (non-)consumption, as hubs of elite mobility, as nodes in elite networks, and, ultimately, as elite territories in the (super-)gentrified geomedia city. I end my article by reflecting on the dialectics of CWS eliteness, thereby suggesting how precariousness and eliteness are interlinked.