Introduction: The Rise of Coworking Spaces and the Opportunity to Broaden Access

In 1989, a British entrepreneur spotted the chance to provide serviced offices to those who were traveling on business.¹ His insight was that technology was increasingly networked, allowing people to continue working even when at a distance from their usual office. The International Workplace Group (IWG), formally known as Regus, grew via a range of investments and acquisitions to dominate the business center market and is the largest flexible workspace owner today. It is telling that WeWork, one of the largest and probably the best known of the coworking companies, has an official dog policy but no accommodation for children.² In the shadow of these behemoths, and in a sector consisting of 35,000+ spaces worldwide, I found just 115 coworking spaces that specifically integrate child care.³

Alongside the corporates, early grassroots coworking spaces were started by artists and as hackerspaces for tech workers in the 1990s in Berlin and later in San Francisco.⁴ Neighborhood spaces catered to the growing number of freelancers, contract and gig workers, independent consultants, and entrepreneurs who could work flexibly from anywhere, usually with a laptop, but sought collaboration and camaraderie. They wanted to feel part of a community, rather than be isolated at home or work, in noisy coffee shops, or committed to an IWG office lease.

As technology accelerated to facilitate remote engagement, by 2020, many workers found a happy medium in sharing desks and relevant services. The pandemic hit the sector hard,⁵ and a majority of coworking spaces reported significant drops in revenue or wound up closing. But the sector recovered strongly from the pandemic’s pause. The workers tend to be young (the average age is 36) and white.⁶ And, despite long being associated with tech bros, the demographics are split fairly evenly between men and women.⁷ Broadening perceptions of “coworking” alongside child care necessarily involves wrangling connotations away from cookie-cutter and trendy chains in business districts to embrace a more expansive definition of what work increasingly looks like for parents who want to more closely combine their work and care lives.

Coworking spaces are expected to continue to increase as the 60 million U.S. freelancers and the number of self-employed and “gig economy” workers grow.⁸ It’s imperative to explore the ways in which coworking spaces are used for a wide range of endeavors when we talk about flexible working. The model of shared working spaces has a number of positives: The autonomy of working on one’s own combined with the conviviality of coworking reportedly reduces feelings of isolation and can benefit both professional networking and social connections.⁹ A large majority in research collated by TeamStage, a project management software company, say they find the environment conducive to focus and productivity, and discover a sense of belonging.

From the start, many parents, primarily mothers, wanted these spaces to offer child care.¹⁰ But few did. And while research on the dynamics of coworking is extensive, there has been scant attention paid to models that accommodate mothers and fathers of young children and to the coworking spaces that successfully incorporate child care. The U.S. Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families funded a study between 2020 and 2023 that found centralizing community services had many benefits and positively impacted low-income families.¹¹ This report is my effort to start to marry the business and economic evidence for the co-location model with neighborhood development initiatives that currently seek to support families with child care and workforce empowerment in siloed ways.