How do socioeconomic and urban form factors affect the spatial distribution of coworking spaces? The case of Shanghai, China

Abstract

As an important incubator of start-up firms and SMEs, coworking spaces can provide affordable office spaces of various sizes and lease structures with a community and synergy base atmosphere. The economic slowdown caused by COVID – 19 had a significant impact on coworking spaces, by limiting the exponential growth seen in recent years. However, the needs of flexible offices when more companies are shifting to remote-first workforces are growing, which helps fuel the continuous disruption of the typical office buildings with bigger office spaces and lengthier lease structures. Shanghai, as the economic center of China, is one of the first cities to recover after COVID – 19. In 2021, 37 new coworking spaces joined the large coworking market in Shanghai before April, which shows the potential and positive prospect of it. The thesis focuses on the location pattern of coworking spaces in Shanghai, answering the questions: “can the current sites cover all of the major customers of coworking spaces?” and “what are good locations for new coworking spaces in the future?”. We will first introduce the overall history and location of coworking in Shanghai, and then test its correlation with socioeconomic and urban form structure. The major findings of the study are: (1) coworking spaces tend to cluster in high-dense areas of companies, especially the top 5% of large enterprises ranked by registered capita; (2) coworking space density has significant correlation with companies in accommodating and catering industry, finance, education, and health and social work. It also has positive correlation with rental and business services and culture, sports and entertainment industry (3) coworking spaces tend to cluster in areas with high ratio of commercial land, and also shows a trend of clustering in areas with high residential trend; (4) coworking space density has positive correlation with road density and subway station density.