Coworking
A Transdisciplinary Overview
Before coworking was a settled research topic, it needed a basic map: what it was, how it differed from adjacent spaces, and why several disciplines should care about it.
What the paper argues
This working paper introduces coworking to an academic audience by distinguishing coworking spaces from serviced offices, business incubators, hacker spaces, makerspaces, startup accelerators, learning spaces, and third places.
It maps early data, definitions, examples, and research questions across economic geography, urban planning, economics, and organisation studies. It is the field-map paper for the later coworking research programme.
Core contribution: A first transdisciplinary map of coworking as a complex social, spatial, and organisational phenomenon
Why it matters
The paper matters because it captures coworking before the category hardened into a commercial real-estate format. It preserves the wider question: how new spaces change the organisation of independent work, learning, community, and urban economies.
The beginning of the coworking programme
This working paper sets up the later focal-point, thesis, and affective-commons papers by treating coworking as a problem for multiple disciplines at once.
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