Portraits of work: mapping emerging coworking dynamics

ABSTRACT

Today’s patterns of work are very much defined by the ‘lean enterprise’ practice, taking form in organizations that are more competitive, customer-driven and agile on the one hand (Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2007). Lean Solutions. New York: Simon & Schuster), and the separation of work from time and space on the other (Hochschild, A. (1997). The time bind. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books). Concepts like work and workspace are subject to an evolving nature and get a new meaning (Kirsh, D. (2000). A few thoughts on cognitive overload. Intellectia, 1(30), 19–51). This triggered the rise of new working spaces, fuelled by the aftermath of the global economic crisis that transformed the practices and meanings of work. Nevertheless, this applies only to particular sectors. This paper builds on the case of Genk, an important economic pole in the Limburg Region of Belgium. The development in the region has always been related to labour-intensive industrial activities. In light of these working shifts targeting mainly big companies/employers, Genk has turned a blind eye on the local proprietors. What about the small entrepreneurs/community economies addressing mainly the local clientele? What evolution do we see in their working pattern? By using a specific visualization tool, a series of interviews were conducted in order to explore in a playful way, existing social and economic networks. The interviews reveal networks that shape a coworking model. The paper will further present the scale of this ‘coworking’ phenomenon experienced in Genk, perceived to be the ‘new model of coworking’ in the context of the collaborative and sharing economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Coworking
• play
• socio-economic networks
• work dynamics
• capacity building

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Teodora Constantinescu is an architect and urban designer with a Master’s degree from the Katholieke Universitei Leuven (BE). A member of the Architect’s and Urbanist’s Chamber of Romania since 2012, she is a researcher within the Spatial Capacity Building research group at Hasselt University (BE) as of 2014. She explores themes such as spatial capacity building, spaces of urban migration, social innovation, urban games and spaces of multicultural micro economies [email: [email protected]].

Oswald Devisch is a civil-engineer architect and urban designer. He studied at the Catholic University of Leuven (BE) and the Bartlett School of Architecture, London (UK). He obtained a doctoral degree at the Technical University of Eindhoven (NL), on spatial simulation models. Since 2006, he is a lecturer and researcher at Hasselt University (BE), exploring themes such as spontaneous transformation processes, new media, private planning, urban games and spatial capacity building [email: [email protected]].

Additional information

Funding

The research was partly funded by the JPI Urban Europe Fund under the research project: Play!UC ‘Playing with Urban Complexity: Using co-located serious games to reduce the urban carbon footprint among young adults’ .