Oliver Rafaj (p), Ilaria Mariotti, Federica Maria Rossi

Christine Liefooghe

This contribution examines the characteristics of inter-company interactions that occurs within coworking spaces (CWS). CWS are mostly private companies, located mainly in cities, that provide workspaces and a diverse portfolio of support services, especially for small companies and individual entrepreneurs. CWS are clustering different economic activities around as well as within themselves. Current research on CWS mainly focuses on the detection and international comparison of their localization factors, on the exploration of differences in the way CWS operate, on description of the structure of CWS users, or on the description of the effects of CWS location on their surrounding areas. However, a deeper investigation of the mutual interactions of users of CWS has not yet been sufficiently explored. This contribution examines the reasons, rates of interactions, and forms of interactions between CWS users operating in different industries. The analysis of inter-company interactions is based on data from international questionnaire survey for users of coworking spaces in Europe, which was carried out between 2022 and 2023.

Janet Merkel, Eva Belvončíková (p), Viktoriia Zhurbas-Lytvyn

Oliver Rafaj

Coworking and coworking spaces have proliferated over the last decade, and research has shown how these flexible, shared workspaces provide crucial resources for freelance and self-employed workers. This paper aims to understand how care is practised in and through coworking spaces. Drawing on interviews with female hosts in different spaces across Europe, we apply Joan Tronto’s ethics of care framework (Tronto, 1993, 2013) to analyse caring practices in coworking spaces. These practises are applied by often-female coworking hosts and community managers who perform affective and emotional labor as part of their work. This paper adds to the literature on how coworking hosts and community managers provide care to “maintain, continue, and repair” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40) community in the everyday practices that develop around coworkers’ needs and the hospitable atmosphere in trying to meet these needs in European coworking spaces. With this specific focus, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the social relationships that coworking can facilitate the gendered dimensions of these new workspaces and recent debates on care in geographical research.

Christine Liefooghe (p)

Eva Belvončíková

Coworking spaces have emerged for more than ten years in major cities around the world but more and more collaborative workplaces are nowadays created in all types of cities and even in rural areas. As part of a French national research programme called Péri#Work (ANR), the spatial dynamics of coworking spaces (CWSs) towards non-metropolitan territories was analyzed in three French regions: Brittany, New Aquitaine and Hauts-de-France. Following the theory of the geographer T. Hägerstrand about the spatial diffusion of innovations, we consider the spatial spread of CWSs as a spatial diffusion process of an organizational innovation (collaborative work in shared spaces ). According to this theory, CWSs are experimented through different waves of “innovation” from the largest metropolises to the rural areas. The objective of the communication is to explore the strengths and limits of this theoretical approach.

Method and data: From a quantitative point of view, a national inventory of third places in France realized for the government (including CWSs but not limited to that type of collaborative spaces) is the only national data base available. These data suggest a process of hierarchical spatial spread of CWSs, from large cities to smaller cities. To test the validity of this approach, we realized a qualitative analysis in three French regions through interviews in 36 CWSs (66 founders or users). The aim was to understand the vectors and channels of this spatial diffusion.

The results of these comparative case studies show that the methods of diffusion vary according to: 1) the demographic and economic structure of the three regions studied; 2) the pioneering role of private actors. Different channels of diffusion are essential to make known coworking methods and coworking spaces as innovative processes. In France, local and regional policies sustain the creation of CWSs, to improve local innovation or telework, and the national government launched in 2019 a new policy dedicated to CWS and other types of third places. Nevertheless, our study shows that the role of public policies is not so essential in the spatial diffusion of CWSs, even in fragile territories far from metropoles.