Supporting open, shared and collaborative workspaces and hubs: recent transformations and policy implications

Shared Spaces or Shelters for Precarious Workers? Coworking Spaces in Italy

“…This strategy, in perspective, may allow employees to work closer to their home, on the one side one side, and to avoid commuting to the city by working in less central areas that are considered safer than metropolitan cores, on the other side. The so-called resilient CSs (Gandini & Cossu, 2019), or Community-led CSs (Avdikos & Merkel, 2020), embrace the evolution of work in a direction of flexibility and independence, by prioritizing strong relationships with their local context, to positively impact this one through entrepreneurial activities. If this trend will be confirmed, after the emergency phase, the relationship between different emerging professionals, their inherent increasing heterogeneity, and innovative workspaces will inevitably change, in the direction of a novel combination and interaction not just with other, diverse, professionals, but with workers with different knowledge, skills, expertise and career paths.…”

Studies of Proximity in Coworking Spaces: the Basic Conceptual Challenges

“…Depending on the subject of research, there are two approaches to the operationalisation of cognitive proximity. The first analyses the compliance of patent technology classes, determined on the basis of relevant classifications (Fritsch and Slavtchev, 2011;Balland, 2012;Broekel and Boschma, 2012). The second approach verifies whether an enterprise is classified within the partner's sector or industry.…”

“…In sensu stricto, organisational proximity describes the degree to which organisations share practices, customs and incentive mechanisms (Metcalfe, 1994). In economic geography, it is most commonly assumed that we can talk about organisational proximity when enterprises belong to the same owner, the same industrial group (Balland, 2012;Godart, 2015) or, more generally, to the same network (Oerlemans and Meeus, 2005). A simplified measurement of proximity is present in studies using a network-based approach.…”

“…The measurement of social proximity is also not easy. It would be best to capture it with the help of network distance between actors in a social network, which is actually quite often used (Balland, 2012;Crescenzi et al ., 2013). However, the social network is not always identified on the basis of strong and permanent links -they are often short-term or one-time cooperation relationships.…”

“…Sometimes the aforementioned triad is supplemented with a fourth category, i.e. non-profit organisations (Balland, 2012). Due to problems with operationalisation, Broekel and Boschma (2012) in their analysis of proximity in the aviation sector analysed only four of its dimensions, ignoring institutional proximity.…”