Co-Working Spaces and the Urban Ecosystem: The Future of Co-Working Post-COVID-19 (Metadata/Documentation), 2022

Pitts, Frederick Harry and Johns, Jennifer and Bozkurt, Odul and Greig, Charnock and Edward, Yates (2025). Co-Working Spaces and the Urban Ecosystem: The Future of Co-Working Post-COVID-19 (Metadata/Documentation), 2022. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857880

The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Dig.IT) will establish itself as an essential resource for those wanting to understand how new digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the world of work. Digitalisation is a topical feature of contemporary debate. For evangelists, technology offers new opportunities for those seeking work and increased flexibility and autonomy for those in work. More pessimistic visions, in contrast, see a future where jobs are either destroyed by robots or degraded through increasingly precarious contracts and computerised monitoring. Take Uber as an example: the company claims it is creating opportunities for self-employed entrepreneurs; while workers' groups increasingly challenge such claims through legal means to improve their rights at work.

While such positive and pessimistic scenarios abound of an increasingly fragmented, digitalised and flexible transformation of work across the globe, theoretical understanding of contemporary developments remains underdeveloped and systematic empirical analyses are lacking. We know, for example, that employers and governments are struggling to cope with and understand the pace and consequences of digital change, while individuals face new uncertainties over how to become and stay 'connected' in turbulent labour markets. Yet, we have no real understanding of what it means to be a 'connected worker' in an increasing 'connected' economy. Drawing resources from different academic fields of study, Dig.IT will provide an empirically innovative and international broad body of knowledge that will offer authoritative insights into the impact of digitalisation on the future of work.

The Dig.IT centre will be jointly led by the Universities of Sussex and Leeds, supported by leading experts from Aberdeen, Cambridge, Manchester and Monash Universities. Its core research programme will cover four broad-ranging research themes. Theme one will set the conceptual and quantitative base for the centre's activities. Theme two involves a large-scale survey of Employers' Digital Practices at Work. Theme three involves qualitative research on employers' and employees' experiences of digitalisation at work across 4 sectors (Creative industries, Business Services, Consumer Services, Public Services). Theme 4 examines how the disconnected attempt to reconnect, through Public Employment Services, the growth of new types of self-employment, platform work and workers' responses to building new forms of voice and representation in an international context. Specific projects include:

1. The Impact of Digitalisation on Work and Employment
-Conceptualising digital futures, historically, regionally and internationally
-Comparative regulation of digital employment
- Mapping regional and international trends of digital technology and work

2. Employers' Digital Practices at Work Survey

3. Employers' and employees' experiences of digital work across sectors
-Changing management processes and practices
-Workers' experiences of digital transformation

4. Reconnecting the disconnected: new channels of voice and representation
- displaced workers, job search and the public employment service
- self-employment, interest representation and voice

Dig.IT will establish a Data Observatory on digital futures at work to promote our findings through an interactive website, report on a series of methodological seminars and new experimental methods and deliver extensive outreach activities. It will act as a one-platform library of resources at the forefront of research on digital work and will establish itself as a focal point for decision-makers across the policy spectrum, connecting with industrial strategy, employment and welfare policy. It will also manage an Innovation Fund designed to fund novel research ideas, from across the academic community as they emerge over the life course of the centre.

Data description (abstract)

Co-working spaces have become an essential part of the digital economy but how will Covid-19 affect their growth in urban areas?

This Round 1 Innovation Fund project followed the experiences of several co-working projects through the pandemic to explore what role co-working spaces might play in new flexible, hybrid models of work.

Research questions
How have co-working spaces responded to the COVID-19 crisis?
How do co-working spaces stand to be incorporated into the economic recovery and urban regeneration efforts in the aftermath?
Method
Over 40 interviews were conducted in Brighton, Bristol and Manchester with representatives from a range of coworking spaces and of local and regional government.

Key findings
The future of urban co-working spaces will be shaped by the wider dynamics of the urban property market and shifts in corporate demand for flexible workspace. These forces will likely prove more influential than anything specific to their founding organisation and social purpose.
The pandemic underscored the ambivalent position of co-working spaces as hosts rather than employers and revealed the variable positions of different co-working space business models in the face of disrupted income streams.
At the same time, co-working spaces have contributed to the recovery from the pandemic by providing places to work collaboratively or collectively alongside shifts towards more flexible work and working from home. In this respect their importance is likely to increase.
Attention is shifting from the towering dominance of London to smaller urban hubs and especially commuting towns.
Although local and national government are beginning to recognise the potential importance of co-working spaces, they have not begun to develop strategies to nurture them. This gap risks leaving co-working spaces and their users adrift in increasingly turbulent and competitive market conditions. This is especially important at a time where they stand to play a central role in providing sites for experimentation with, and adaptation to, new digitally-mediated working practices emerging from the pandemic, for a potentially much broader array of workers than spaces previously served.

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