Hot desks in cool places: coworking spaces as post-digital industry and movement

This project addresses the future of work, and battles over this future, by studying a new type of media-enhanced, urban workplaces: so-called coworking spaces (CWS). In line with existing research, we recognize CWS as a growing global business that emerges at the nexus of key societal trends – notably, the gig economy, the sharing economy, and the platform economy – but also as powerful social trendsetters that are likely to predict tomorrow’s workplaces and urban spaces. WeWork and other coworking pioneers represent post-digital, “touristified”, workplaces that ultimately redefine what it means to work.

Along these lines, the overall aim of Hot Desks in Cool Places is to inquire how the current expansion of CWS contributes to the (re)production of social and spatial power relations in the postdigital capitalist society. The project deploys mainly qualitative, ethnographically oriented methods.