This report explores how coworking as a phenomenon manifests in Sweden, and discusses what impact coworking spaces might have on local and regional development in Sweden’s rural areas. Through a mixed methods approach, we have mapped the number of coworking spaces in Sweden and interviewed a selection of owners and members to understand driving forces for and effects of using these spaces.
Our findings show that the occurrence of coworking spaces in Sweden is much more widespread than previously known, as there are far more spaces than popular aggregation sites suggest – our study found that for Sweden they only show 14-18% of the actual number of spaces available. We also found that coworking businesses in Sweden are predominantly limited companies (84%) and are fairly young businesses (median starting year 2019). Only 21% were started in 2015 or earlier. 27% of the surveyed coworking spaces were started during the pandemic and predominantly in rural areas. In addition, we have found data to suggest that they are indeed playing an integrating role for people who prefer to live in rural areas due to lifestyle choices. Coworking spaces have a great variety in size and purpose, but we have found common themes to be creating networks, learning and creating new ideas, and community. Coworking spaces are used by remote workers and act as landing sites that also serve their communities with learning, business opportunities and embeddedness.
The contributions of the report are also twofold. We show that the actual number of coworking spaces is five to seven times higher than shown in the most well-known aggregation websites that present them. This means that studies based on data from these websites only deal with a minority of coworking spaces; a minority that most likely consist of the biggest and most commercially oriented coworking spaces. Policy recommendations based on such studies might be biased and not suitable for the majority of coworking spaces. The other contribution is that we take Duranton’s and Puga’s (2004) foundations of agglomeration economies, matching, sharing and learning, as starting points for our analysis and find indications that coworking spaces tend to fulfill these criteria.
We argue that the dispersion of coworking spaces in rural and popular tourist destinations might increase the number of remote workers, and that gaining accurate information on how many spaces there actually are will allow for better informed policy decisions and labor market legislation when it comes to remote work.
The full report is available here.