Does the future of coworking lie in mixed-use infrastructures, blended with residential, shopping and leisure activities?
Does the future of coworking lie in mixed-use infrastructures, with blended residential, shopping, leisure and workspace facilities surrounding it?
An article in the MIT Sloan School of Management online magazine about the future of commercial real estate seems to say so.
“A lot of our clients [property owners] are telling us right now they have offices in the right cities but in the wrong neighborhoods”, comments Ben Breslau, chief research officer at JLL, quoted in the article. He predicted that more people will want to work and live somewhere that feels like a community and said that mixed-use environments can help achieve this.
There is a need for less city rules creating artificial exclusive activity zones and a need for more blending, stresses the Real Estate expert Dror Poleg, author of the best-seller book “Rethinking Real Estate”, in 2019.
“The restaurants are full, the hotels are full, the venues are full. Just the offices seem to have a problem, and housing seems to have a problem in terms of accommodating people where they actually want to be”, observes Dror Poleg.
In addition, there is a strong need for flexibility. According to Dror Poleg, the successful offices of the future will be those which will embrace the goals the coworking champion WeWork advocated in the first place: “to have a branded network that gives people the freedom to book whatever they need (such as a full office or a desk) and access whatever they need as their business or job demands it.”
However, there is an economical challenge ahead of it. “One of the reasons that it’s hard to make money from [this model] is that both our building codes and the whole financing ecosystem just cannot accommodate these things. Whether it’s too expensive or takes too long to create, we need to figure out how to accommodate that flexibility, because this is what our economy needs”, he concludes.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/commercial-real-estate-preps-workplace-future
