Coworking, a Way to Achieve Sustainable Mobility? Designing an Interdisciplinary Research Project

Abstract

Sustainable mobility has been one of the central paradigms of research in the field of transport and mobility for several decades. However, the implications of adopting the concept of "sustainable mobility" for the conduct of interdisciplinary research has been little discussed within the relevant research community. Research in the field of transport and mobility has nevertheless been the setting for major debates in recent years on the question of interdisciplinarity, or even transdisciplinarity, with the emergence of mobility studies as opposed to transportation studies. The objective of this paper is to show, empirically, how researchers who are specialised in mobility and transport issues, but who belong to different disciplines (anthropology, computer science, economics, geomatics, sociology and urban planning) have sought to build an interdisciplinary research project-which is currently ongoing-around the links between the development of coworking, which is a new way of organising work, mobility and sustainability. This paper sets out to highlight cross-fertilisation between disciplines, the issues raised, and the difficulties encountered. As such, it provides an account that is as faithful as possible to our experience of conducting interdisciplinary research in the area of sustainable mobility.

What Is a Sustainable Coworking Space?

“…What is particularly noticeable here is that all perspectives believe that a coworking space should be close to public transport in order to be sustainable. This suggests that sustainable mobility is a common sustainability aspect valued among coworking spaces and confirms previous research [15]. Furthermore, it seems that all perspectives find encouraging members to be socially responsible to be somewhat important.…”

“…Thus, Lejoux et al identify sustainable mobility as a promising topic in this context. They also state that whilst there is a suggested link, there are no clear findings yet [15].…”

“…This investigation is therefore of an exploratory nature, and as such Q-methodology is applied. Q-methodology is a research methodology that is used to gather people's subjective perceptions on a certain topic [15]. This method was deemed applicable, as sustainability is a popular topic among coworking space owners and managers, whilst the current research on this topic is lagging behind.…”

Learnings from User Digital Trail Post-Occupancy Evaluation before COVID-19 for Future Workplace Analysis and Design

“…Traditional analog space-planning and occupancy studies are not functional anymore due to new dynamics of flexibility and collaboration between users [18,40,41]. Due to increased mobility in their day-to-day work [40] collaborative workers today interact in a wide variety of working environments [1,42].…”

“…Traditional analog space-planning and occupancy studies are not functional anymore due to new dynamics of flexibility and collaboration between users [18,40,41]. Due to increased mobility in their day-to-day work [40] collaborative workers today interact in a wide variety of working environments [1,42]. Location tracking systems such as sensors, Wi-Fi, or facial recognition are currently used to understand space dynamics [17,18,43], user behavior [44,45], and energy consumption [46].…”