Book review : New workplaces – location patterns, urban effects and development trajectories. A worldwide investigation

Abstract

In the last 15 years, new workplaces (such as co-working spaces (CSs), maker spaces (MSs), fablabs and other collaborative and shared spaces) have been increasingly evolved in their planning, design and management, as well as in the daily life of their users (e.g. freelancers, entrepreneurs and students, and more recently, employees). Emerging workplaces and new ways of working are causing several changes to our cities, regions and society which are not fully explored yet. Moreover, new workplaces are established (albeit not restricted because of emerging research in rural areas) in urban areas. In these areas, new workplaces are continually contributing to transformations, such as, socio-economic, cultural, spatial and technological. The understanding of new workplaces is a complex issue for researchers, practitioners and stakeholders, and lately, city planners, policy makers and local governments. On one hand, this complexity is a result of the myriad of theories (social capital, urban economics and economic geography, open innovation, new sharing economy) and research methods (qualitative, quantitative and mix-methods); on the other hand, it is due to the variety of socio-spatial and economic characteristics, as well as functions and uses of these new workplaces. Thus, even the concept of new workplaces is generally subject to multiple interpretations and understandings depending on the perspectives, which are usually from social science disciplines (including sociology, architecture, urban and regional planning and economics). Indeed, the knowledge of theories, methods and practices in the field of new workplaces is itself intertwined with the economic, physical, socio-cultural and planning dimensions of each context.