The financialisation and platformisation of coworking: WeWork and coworking platforms as a spatial fix for venture capital

Abstract

It is often argued that coworking spaces emerged as bottom-up initiatives and proliferated after the 2007/08 financial crisis to help freelancers cope with the economic fallout (Avdikos and Kalogeresis 2017; Merkel 2015; 2019; Mooshammer and Mörtenböck 2021). Furthermore, it is discussed that coworking is a very broad and still evolving phenomenon, ranging from small, self-organised spaces to ‘a ‘neo-corporate’ model of flexible work embodied by global franchise giants such as WeWork’ (Gandini and Cossu 2021, 431). What is still missing, however, is an explanation of these commercialisation tendencies in relation to broader political-economic developments and their impact on both urban economies and the capitalist valorisation of space. My paper responds to this research gap by examining financialisation and platformisation trends within the coworking sector. Empirically, the analysis is based on fieldwork, where I studied independent coworking spaces in Berlin, corporate coworking chains (in particular WeWork), and the emerging market of coworking platforms.

My analysis suggests that commercialisation tendencies within the coworking sector are embedded in broader developments towards the financialised valorisation of urban space (Moreno 2014). By discussing how WeWork provides a ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 2018) for abundant venture capital, I argue that the workplace is being reconfigured as a financial asset. To explore how finance capital became interested in the coworking phenomenon, the presentation takes a closer look at the business model of coworking spaces, which provide ‘space as a service’ (Sadowski 2020). Coworking spaces are discussed as a new type of landlord that extracts rent by providing access to property they do not own. It is shown how this leads to the need to actively optimise spatial resources, to create ‘rent gaps’ (Smith 1979) that allow more rent to be extracted through the subscription that coworking itself has to pay to the actual owner of the space.

The second part of the presentation looks at the emerging market for coworking platforms, which includes (1) platforms that mediate access to a network of coworking spaces, (2) platforms that function as hybrid work and workplace management software, (3) platforms that facilitate the management of coworking spaces, and (4) platforms that function as marketplaces that list existing coworking and event spaces. In doing so, it discusses a new commercialisation trend that has not been researched to any significant extent. By discussing examples for each type of coworking platform, it is shown how the coworking sector is subject not only to financialisation, but also to platformisation tendencies (Richardson 2020).

The paper asks what classic urban political economy concepts such as the ‘rent gap’ (Smith 1979) and the ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 2018) contribute to the analysis, and how they need to be updated to speak to new processes of spatial valorisation.