Nick Clifton (p)

Tuzin Baycan

The number of self-employed, freelancers, and remote workers has risen steadily; simultaneously a range of collaborative shared workspaces - coworking spaces – has emerged in which these individuals ‘work alone together’.
The broader context for these developments is the growth of the knowledge economy and the role of ICT. An upward trend in remote working would apparently suggest at least some truth in the ‘death of distance’ hypothesis (Cairncross, 2001); however, irrefutable evidence also exists that the rise of the globalised knowledge economy has seen an accelerated spatial polarisation (Ehrenhalt, 2012) of outcomes and apparently ever-increasing forces of agglomeration. McCann (2008) makes convincing arguments that rapid improvements in ICT have increased the quantity, variety and complexity of knowledge involved in economic activity, in turn increasing what he terms the spatial transaction costs involved in its use. As much of this knowledge is non-routine or tacit, high levels of face-to-face interaction are thus required to maintain effective exchange relationships.
However, existing research is skewed towards the social or community aspects of coworking, treated largely as an end in itself. We argue that this represents only a partial account of coworking. Thus in addressing the basic research question as to why people who no longer need to ‘huddle’ apparently choose to do so (for at least part of their working lives), we delineate inputs (social and environmental factors), outputs (community, interaction and knowledge sharing) and outcomes (innovation, growth) of coworking and investigate these quantitatively for the first time. Data was collected via a questionnaire survey of coworkers across two coworking spaces in South East Wales, UK.
In general, results confirm the role of coworking spaces as a context for the exchange of tacit knowledge, facilitated by opportunities for face to face interaction. In turn, the evidence suggests that these interactions are mainly, but not exclusively, taking place on an informal or untraded interdependency basis for knowledge sharing. Thus, there is a clear indication from the data that improved innovation and income are then forthcoming- despite these typically not being explicit motivations for the coworkers.
Finally we discuss potential limitations of the study, possible policy implications – particularly regarding regions which are more peripheral and lack strong entrepreneurial ecosystems. We also consider potentially fruitful areas of further research such counterfactual surveys of those presently not using coworking spaces, multivariate and longitudinal methods to further explore the causal relationships between inputs, outputs and outcomes.

Senem Kozaman (p), Neslihan Elif Alpar, İsra Hatipoğlu

Nick Clifton

Space and economics have evolved with the change in the information- communication technologies. In this change process, sharing economy has become crucial for sustainable growth and economic development. From this framework; co-working spaces are the new model of workplaces which is based on sharing and collaborative economy and works with different groups as a community. The aim of the research is to identify to what extent and how co-working spaces provide an environment for the flow of knowledge and development of entrepreneurship - innovation capacity with networking opportunities in Istanbul. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with the users from different sectors and founders of spaces to identify the capacity of innovation- entrepreneurship and creation of knowledge.

Eva Coll-Martínez , Carles Méndez-Ortega (p)

Senem Kozaman

The present paper investigates the location patterns and the effects co-working spaces (CWS) generate on the urban context. The focus is on Barcelona, one of the most important creative hubs in Europe in terms of knowledge-based, creative, digital, and sharing economy, and the city hosting the largest number of co-working spaces in Spain. The paper addresses three main questions: 1) Which are the location patterns of co-working spaces in Barcelona? 2) Do CWS agglomerate in the same areas? And, 3) Do CWS coagglomerate with specific firm activities? To do that, this paper uses open data on Barcelona neighbourhoods’ socioeconomic composition provided by the Statistics Department of the Council of Barcelona and micro-geographic data of private CWS and creative labs in Barcelona. By using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Kd functions of agglomeration and coagglomeration, results show that CWS are highly concentrated in central areas of Barcelona where there are greater chances to meet customers and suppliers, the proximity to urban amenities and the fact of being associated to an specific place-image. Moreover, they coagglomerate with specific kinds of firms and to those most related to creative industries. These results are relevant when assessing what it should be the actual goal of urban policies in Barcelona.

Tuzin Baycan (p), Meltem Parlak

Carles Méndez-Ortega

Firms and individuals in creative industries increasingly choose co-working spaces as their workspace. The number of those new type of workplaces increase in Istanbul as it also increases globally. Istanbul as the most populated city in the country hosts the biggest part of the creative workforce and its infrastructure in the country. As expected, the city hosts the largest number of co-working spaces as well. This paper focuses on the structure of co-working spaces in Istanbul and aims to describe the main characteristic of co-working spaces in order to reveal the typologies of them. In this context, this paper addresses the following research questions (1) What is the physical structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (2) What is the financial structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (3) What is the community structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (4) What is the organization and management structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (5) What is the decision-making structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (6) What is the partnership structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? (7) What is the communication structure of creative hubs in Istanbul? Thus, 16 co-working spaces in Istanbul have been empirically investigated through face-to-face interviews, observations, web sites and advertisements. The results of the study reveal that co-working spaces have different characteristics and cannot put into one typology. Within this context, four different co-working typologies has been identified in Istanbul. Those typologies are ‘chain co-working spaces’, ‘lifestyle co-working spaces’, ‘community oriented co-working spaces’ and ‘service oriented co-working spaces’. The results of the paper make a contribution to the literature to better understand co-working spaces in urban context as well as the changing working environment of the city in the creative economy era.