Community

What do people want from a space?

It’s a question that came up several times when our own Ken Loh joined Hector Kolonas on This Week in Coworking recently.

And today, more than ever, there really isn’t one answer.

Someone looking for somewhere quiet to work for an afternoon has a very different need from a creative team that needs podcast studios, a company looking for a 20-person office, or a remote worker who wants to meet people working in the same industry.
So should coworking spaces become more specialised, or simply get clearer about who they’re for?

The desk still matters. So do location, price and practical amenities. But increasingly, perhaps operators need to be clear about who their space is for, what people can do there and why someone would choose it over all the other places they could work.

This approach has implications for everything from workspace design and community to websites, technology and the information operators make available online.

More choice about where to work

The old workplace choice was relatively simple: either head to the office or work somewhere else.

Today, someone might work from their company office two days a week, from home another two and book somewhere else when they need a meeting room, want a change of environment or need to work alongside other people.

Coworking sits somewhere within that much wider set of choices, and people don’t necessarily want the same thing from it.

Recent research into coworking preferences looked at 500 people across 37 coworking spaces. It found that accessibility, affordability and services all influence where people choose to work. It also concluded that spaces need a balance of areas for focused work and social interaction.

This moves the conversation beyond simply providing desks. People are choosing an environment, and different people will choose different ones.

The advantage of niche

Hector and Ken discussed Qube on the podcast, and this space certainly isn’t trying to be a workplace for everybody.

It describes itself as a clubhouse for the creator economy. Its locations combine coworking with music production, DJ, podcast and photography studios, alongside events and a community of people working across creative industries.

It’s an easy-to-understand proposition. If you’re a music producer, podcaster or content creator, you can quickly work out why you might want to be there.

And the facilities reflect the people QUBE wants to attract. Its London locations include dozens of professional creative studios alongside coworking, offices and social spaces. Take a look at QUBE.

That doesn’t mean every coworking operator needs to pick an industry and build podcast studios.

Niche can take lots of forms. It might be the type of businesses you serve, the neighbourhood you’re in, the events you run, the size of companies you accommodate or the facilities you provide.

What’s useful is giving people enough information to decide whether your space fits the way they want to work.

The ‘right’ community is everything

“Community” has been part of the coworking vocabulary for years.

But simply saying you have one doesn’t tell a prospective member very much. What kind of community is it? Who works there? Does the community reflect the type of space you’re trying to create?

Do people generally come in to concentrate, meet other people, work with their team, find collaborators, or a mixture of all four?

There’s some research behind the importance of that fit. A study of coworkers in Germany and Austria looked at five needs: community, collaboration, amenities, location and cost. Of those, matching someone’s community needs was associated with both their job satisfaction and their intention to stay in a coworking space.

That distinction isn’t necessarily about having more community. Someone who wants a quiet professional environment doesn’t need to be persuaded to attend three networking events a week. But another member may specifically be looking for collaborators and introductions.

The job is to understand what your members value and make it easier for the right people to find that very environment.

Your website as a reality show

This is where another point from the podcast becomes interesting. Look at a lot of coworking websites, and you’ll see beautiful photographs of empty meeting rooms, desks and kitchens.

Those images show the facilities, yet don’t necessarily show the experience.

If community, atmosphere and workspace fit influence why someone chooses one space over another, prospective members need some way to understand those things before they visit.
That might mean showing actual members using the space, or it could mean talking about the businesses based there, showing events, introducing the team or explaining what a normal working day looks like.

Again, QUBE is an interesting example. Its website doesn’t just show studio equipment. It shows creators, member events, collaborations and the kinds of work being produced there.
Your website doesn’t need to pretend the space is busy every second of the day; it just needs to give someone a realistic idea of what they can expect.

AI makes good information more important

There’s another reason operators should think about how clearly they describe their spaces online.

The way people find things on the internet is changing. Someone looking for somewhere to work may increasingly ask an AI assistant for something quite detailed:

Find me somewhere near Canary Wharf where I can work for the afternoon and record a podcast afterwards.

Or:

I need a meeting room for eight people tomorrow, close to Liverpool Street, with a whiteboard and good video conferencing.

For a search engine or AI service to answer questions like these, it needs useful, contextual information about what a workspace offers, beyond the basics – location, opening hours and facilities.

Useful information increasingly includes availability, capacity, pricing, accessibility, amenities and what can actually be booked.

Structured data already plays a role in helping machines understand businesses online. Google recommends LocalBusiness structured data to provide information such as location and opening hours, and supports mechanisms for businesses that want bookings or other actions to happen from search experiences.

So the same information that helps a person decide whether your space is suitable also makes your workspace easier for machines to understand.

AI changes what people come together for

The more work we can do individually with AI, the less reason there may be to travel somewhere simply to sit at a laptop. This doesn’t remove the need for workplaces, but it may make the reasons for coming together more intentional.

You meet because you want to work through something on a whiteboard, bring a team together, record something, meet a client, learn from somebody or find a collaborator. Or maybe just because you want to work around other people rather than spend another day at home.

The value of physical workspace becomes less about providing somewhere with Wi-Fi and more about supporting the things people want to do when they’re there.

At the same time, flex is serving larger companies

Specificity isn’t only a story about freelancers, creators or independent coworking spaces. Flex is also serving larger, more established companies. Dublin is a great example. CBRE reported earlier this year that flexible workspace had grown to 3.2% of the city’s office stock, with prime-grade flex occupancy at around 90%.

H1 2026 data also showed demand spreading across professional services, financial services and life sciences.

A 30-person professional services team is solving a very different workplace problem from a freelance creator. Both might sit within flex, but they’re not the same product.

Coworking isn’t one thing anymore

We still talk about coworking as though it’s one thing. In reality, a creator-focused space, a premium city-centre flex office, a suburban workspace and a community-led independent operator can offer very different experiences.

Research reflects that variation too. A 2026 literature review highlights differences in the motivations and workplace preferences of urban and non-urban coworking users, while research into London coworking locations has linked coworking with areas where businesses rely heavily on tacit knowledge and collaboration.

So perhaps asking whether “traditional coworking” is dead isn’t particularly useful.

A better question is whether operators know what people are choosing their space for.

Because the answer shapes the spaces you build, amenities you invest in, events you run, memberships you sell, information you track and even the photographs you put on your website.

It also affects how easily people — and increasingly machines — can understand whether your space is right for them.

Coworking isn’t dying, it’s building around why people come together.