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ABSTRACT
The present paper investigates the location patterns and the effects co-working spaces generate on the urban context, issues that have been neglected by the existing literature. The focus is on Milan, the core of the Italian knowledge-based, creative, digital, and sharing economy, and the city hosting the largest number of co-working spaces in Italy. The paper addresses three main questions: (1) Where are the main locations of co-working spaces in Milan? (2) Are there any transformative effects of co-working spaces, respectively at the urban scale and at the very local scale? (3) What are their impacts in terms of spatial transformation and in terms of innovation in practices (for instance, work, leisure, or culture)? Desk research showed that location patterns of co-working spaces resemble those of service industries in urban areas, with a propinquity to the so-called “creative clusters.” Field research shed light on urban effects, such as the participation of workers in co-working spaces in local community initiatives, their contribution to urban revitalization trends, and micro-scale physical transformations. The paper, therefore, helps to fill the gap in the literature about the location patterns of these new working spaces and their urban effects at different scales, both in terms of urban spaces and practices.
Acknowledgments
The present article aims at disseminating part of the research and teaching activities recently implemented within the new Research Hub Innovations, Productions, and Urban Spaces of the Architecture and Urban Studies Department at the Politecnico di Milano. The authors are grateful to the editor and the reviewers for the fruitful comments and suggestions to the previous version of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Ilaria Mariotti is an associate professor in urban regional economics in the Architecture and Urban Studies Department of the Politecnico di Milano.
Carolina Pacchi is an associate professor in urban planning and design in the Architecture and Urban Studies Department of the Politecnico di Milano.
Stefano Di Vita is a research fellow and adjunct professor in urban planning and design in the Architecture and Urban Studies Department of the Politecnico di Milano.
Notes
1. Co-working spaces are innovative workplaces where independent (and frequently precarious) knowledge-based, creative, and digital workers––mainly freelancers or self-employed professionals––share their work spaces. They rent a desk (for months, days, or even just hours) in return for different kinds of services: both traditional (such as, for instance, administrative offices, meeting rooms, or spaces of aggregation) and digital (such as, for instance, wifi connections, or printers).
2. As an example, from January 2015 to February 2016, innovative start ups––characterized by high levels of technology and mainly operating in the fields of advanced services (information and communication; professional, scientific and technical activities; services for firms) grew by +61.5 percent in Italy and by +65.7 percent in Milan. This is an impressive phenomenon, even though the numbers are still small. Furthermore, within the Italian national context, Milan is the city with the highest concentration of innovative start ups (779), above Rome (450), and Turin (260) (Camera di Commercio di Milano, Citation2016).
3. Of the 285 co-working spaces in Italy in 2014, 190 are located in the Northern part of the country, 55 in the Central region, and 40 in the South. Within the Italian national context, Milan is the city with the highest concentration of these innovative workplaces (59), followed by Rome (23), and Turin (16) (MyCowo, Citation2014).
4. For our purposes, we define a “co-worker” as a person (one-person company or employee) working in a co-working space.
5. While co-working spaces are places where freelance workers share their working spaces and benefit from a collaborative working environment, makerspaces are dedicated to sharing the material production of objects. Therefore, they can be defined as places in which people meet to produce things in different domains. Among makerspaces, in the last few years there has been a growing diffusion of FabLabs, which follow the model of the MIT Fabrication Laboratory: they are places devoted to digital fabrication and experimentation. The relevance of making, as a new attitude towards fabrication, has been the object of extensive investigation (Anderson, 2012).
6. Website: www.deskwanted.wordpress.com.
7. Source: Deskwanted (www.deskwanted.wordpress.com).
8. Specific information about the CSs was also collected through telephone calls to CSs managers.
9. The 2012 Milan Urban Plan introduced an articulation of the municipal area into 88 NIL (that is, Nuclei di Identità Locale or Local Identity Units), which try to correspond to city neighborhoods.
10. ATM stands for Azienda Trasporti Milanesi.
11. The Sector Economic Innovation, Smart City and University of the City Council approved the Milan Smart City Guidelines and the Milan Sharing City Guidelines, which highlight the importance of ICTs as engines of urban change, and the meaning of cooperation and sharing economy for future urban development. On the one hand, by mixing and modifying traditional habits of producers and consumers of goods and services; on the other, by producing innovations in terms of economic growth, social inclusion, education and training, technological development, and spatial regeneration (Morandi and Di Vita, Citation2015).
12. At the same time, the Milan City Council has directly invested in incubators such as, in chronological order, PoliHub, Alimenta, SpeedMiUp, FabriQ, Base, MHUMA, and the future Smart City Lab.
13. As the Milan urban fabric is strongly radiocentric, with the Cathedral in its geographical center, this monument represents the very spatial heart of the city and, accordingly to the urban functions located in its surroundings; its district also represents the main centrality of local cultural, economic, and social activities.
14. Design Week is a temporary fringe event taking place every year since the early 1990s within several Milan neighborhoods during the Design Exhibition hosted by the Milan Trade Fair.
15. This sector comprises community managers, social media content producers, and branding consultants (Gandini, Citation2015).
16. This information comes from both our desk research and field research.
17. Up to now, in Bergamo, Brescia, Cosenza, Genoa, Milan (via Calabiana and via Merano), Padua, Pisa, Pordenone, Rome, Sarzana, and Turin, as well as in Barcelona (Spain), Bucharest (Romania), Kaunas (Lithuania), and Tirana (Albania) (www.talentgarden.org).