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The late 2000s witnessed a wide diffusion of innovative workplaces, named coworking spaces, designed to host creative people and entrepreneurs: the coworkers. Sharing the same space may provide a collaborative community to those kinds of workers who otherwise would not enjoy the relational component associated with a traditional corporate office. Coworking spaces can bring several benefits to freelancers and independent workers, such as knowledge transfer, informal exchange, cooperation, and forms of horizontal interaction with others, as well as business opportunities. Moreover, additional effects may concern the urban context: from community building, with the subsequent creation of social streets, and the improvement of the surrounding public space, to a wider urban revitalization, both from an economic and spatial point of view. These “indirect” effects are neglected by the literature, which mainly focuses on the positive impact on the workers’ performance. The present paper aimed to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the effects of coworking spaces in Italy on the local context, devoting particular attention to the relation with social streets. To reach this goal, the answers (320) to an on-line questionnaire addressed to coworkers were analysed. The results showed that three quarters of the coworkers reported a positive impact of coworking on the urban and local context, where 10 out of 100 coworking spaces developed and/or participated in social streets located in Italian cities, but also in the suburban and peripheral areas.

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The Globalization and World City Research Network classifies global cities according to their connectivity through advanced producer service activities. Recent studies have suggested there is scope to develop a new classification of cities based on advanced logistics services. Within this framework, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to develop an interlocking Logistics Global Network for advanced logistics in Europe and measure the Logistics Global Network Connectivity (LGNC) of the host cities; (ii) to explore the variables explaining each the cities' score on the LGNC. The aim is achieved by means of a mixed methodological approach based on Taylor's Interlocking Network Model and via econometric analysis through Ordinary Least Square regression (OLS).