No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The shifting spatial contours of employment: evaluating the evolution of post-Covid strategic planning in England in response to third space and the flexible work model
Abstract
This article examines the spatial implications of flexible working post-Covid through the concepts of third space and the flexible work model. Whilst research to date has largely focused on city centres, this article draws on a case study of a new settlement, Worcestershire Parkway, and the views of planning/property professionals to investigate the emerging implications for planning theory and practice. In particular, it highlights and critically evaluates the importance of flexibility and future-proofing, strong private sector partnership to develop employment strategies and design codes to set parameters for development as the cardinal features of post-Covid strategic planning practice.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The highly contagious coronavirus and the rapid spread of COVID-19 disease have generated a global public health crisis, which is being addressed at various local and global scales through social distancing measures and guidelines. This is coupled with debates about the nature of living and working patterns through intensive utilisation of information and telecommunication technologies, leading to the social and institutional acceptability of these patterns as the “new normal”. The primary objective of this article is to instigate a discourse about the potential contribution of architecture and urban design and planning in generating knowledge that responds to pressing questions about future considerations of post pandemic architecture and urbanism. Methodologically, the discussion is based on a trans-disciplinary framework, which is utilised for conceptual analysis and is operationalized by identifying and discoursing design and planning implications. The article underscores relevant factors; originates insights for areas where future research will be critically needed, through key areas: a) Issues related to urban dynamics are delineated from the perspective of urban and human geography, urban design and planning, and transportation engineering; b) Questions that pertain to socio-spatial implications and urban space/ urban life dialectics stem from the field of environmental psychology; and c) Deliberations about new environments that accommodate new living/working styles supervene from ethnographical and anthropological perspectives. The article concludes with an outlook that captures key aspects of the needed synergy between architectural and urban education, research, and practice and public health in a post pandemic virtual and global world.
Australia’s cities and regions are the envy of the world for their natural beauty and lifestyle amenities and attractions. Not only has this sustained the tree-change and sea-change movement, with broadband connectivity and the COVID-19 pandemic so-called ‘e-changers’ and ‘flee-changers’ are part of the populus seeking to combine career aspirations with lifestyle destinations. This paper discusses the growing popularity of remote, particularly home-based work, and planning and design responses that accommodate this type of work in residential neighbourhoods. The issues are exemplified through a case study of the City of Gold Coast drawing on mixed methods including survey instruments and a design charrette facilitated by the authors. The design charrette is reported via three integrative narratives of a remote worker, the neighbourhood and the city. Findings outline preferences of remote workers towards built environment and urban design features enabling collaboration and knowledge exchange and assist in a better understanding of the socio-economic factors behind the spatial distribution of home-based work. The study’s findings offer a range of implications for appropriate urban planning and design responses.
Until recently there has been little critical consideration of the privatization of urban planning expertise. In this paper we draw on archival research in England to present an historical analysis of the role of private sector planners over the post-war period. In so doing, the paper provides one of the first considerations of changing historical perceptions of the roles of private sector professionals in the delivery of public planning, assessing the claims through which markets in urban planning expertise have been both problematized and justified over time. Tracing the reorganization of planning expertise allows us to view public and private sector roles not as fixed and immutable categories but instead as historically contingent outcomes of struggles over how the contested public interest purposes of planning have been defined and realized.
This introduction discusses the objectives and concepts underlying the Special Issue on the new spatialities of work in the city. It highlights the urban impact of both the changing spatiotemporal working patterns and the increased diversity of workspaces that have resulted from post-industrial restructuring, globalisation, labour market flexibilisation and digitisation. Even pre-COVID-19, when the research in this Special Issue was undertaken, this impact on the urban structure and the social fabric of cities was significant, but it had remained underexplored. Here, therefore, we question models of work and commuting that continue to assume the spatially ‘fixed’ workplace, and explore how new understandings of workspace and multi-locality, developed in this Special Issue, can inform future research. This, we argue, is more important than ever as we come to understand the medium- and long-term impacts of pandemic-altered work practices in cities. We further argue that the spatialities of work need to be connected with research on health, job quality and wellbeing in cities – such as, for example, on the risks that COVID-19 has exposed for driving and mobile work.
This paper has three main objectives. It traces the “closed” urban model of city development, critiques it at length, showing how it has led to an unsustainable dead-end, represented in post-Covid-19 “ghost town” status for many central cities, and proposes a new “open” model of city design. This is avowedly an unsegregated and non-segmented utilisation of now often abandoned city-centre space in “open” forms favouring urban prairie, or more formalised urban parklands, interspersed with so-called “agritecture” in redundant high-rise buildings, shopping malls and parking lots. It favours sustainable theme-park models of family entertainment “experiences” all supported by sustainable hospitality, integrated mixed land uses and sustainable transportation. Consideration is given to likely financial resource issues but the dearth of current commercial investment opportunities from the old carbonised urban model, alongside public policy and consumer support for urban greening, are concluded to form a propitious post-coronavirus context for furthering the vision.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges and has changed society; some of these changes seem temporary, and others seem permanent. The uncertainty of the duration of this pandemic has introduced changes without the knowledge of how permanent they are, and has raised awareness regarding a need for a shift to a new normal. This new normal will affect different aspects of our life routines and activities, such as travel behaviour, personal hygiene, socializing, and our working environment. In the wake of the global pandemic, which has been followed by lockdowns, curfews, social distancing, and working from home, the future of the office has turned into an open question, as COVID has changed our expectation of how, where, and when people can do their jobs. Big companies like Twitter and Facebook have announced that they are allowing employees to permanently work from home; however, some industry leaders are using the work-from-home experience to reimagine the role of the office in the future. What will the future office look like, and what can we expect of the workplace environment? In this paper, we propose a third solution, which is the merging of the current scenario of the classic office and working from home, which is entitled the ‘local co-working hub’. By studying the challenges and opportunities of each of the current approaches, the potential of the local co-working hub is highlighted.
Background
Considering the recent and current evolution of work and the work context, the meaning of work is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in research in the social sciences and humanities, particularly in psychology. In order to understand and measure what contributes to the meaning of work, Morin constructed a 30-item questionnaire that has become predominant and has repeatedly been used in research in occupational psychology and by practitioners in the field. Nevertheless, it has been validated only in part.
Method
Meaning of work questionnaire was conducted in French with 366 people (51.3% of women; age: ( M = 39.11, SD = 11.25); 99.2% of whom were employed with the remainder retired). Three sets of statistical analyses were run on the data. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted on independent samples.
Results
The questionnaire described a five-factor structure. These dimensions (Success and Recognition at work and of work, α = .90; Usefulness, α = .88; Respect for work, α = .88; Value from and through work, α = .83; Remuneration, α = .85) are all attached to a general second-order latent meaning of work factor (α = .96).
Conclusions
Validation of the scale, and implications for health in the workplace and career counseling practices, are discussed.
The covid-19 pandemic crisis presents unprecedented challenges and has profound implications for the way people live and work. Information and communication technologies have been playing a crucial role in ensuring business continuity as lockdown measures have suddenly forced employees from across the globe to telework, often leaving them unprepared and ill-equipped. This paper develops an epidemic-induced telework adjustment model derived from the theory of Work Adjustment and the Interactional Model of Individual Adjustment. It is tested on a sample of 1574 teleworkers in France. The results demonstrate the superiority of the influence of crisis-specific variables that are professional isolation, tele-work environment, work increase and stress. Implications for research are discussed while concrete and actionable recommendations for organisations are provided. ARTICLE HISTORY
Report on the growth, characteristics and consequences of homeworking before and during the UK 2020 lockdown.
Recent growth in flexible work which is detached from traditional urban workplaces, including homeworking, mobile working and forms of self-employment (gig work), has increased interest in the quality of work. This article compares job quality indicators between urban-based workers in standard (employer/business premises) and non-standard (homeworking, driving/travelling, mobile working) workplaces. Multinomial logistic regression is applied to UK panel data from four waves (2010–2011, 2012–2013, 2014–2015, 2016–2017) of the Understanding Society study. The analysis finds that urban-based employees working at home, predominantly in highly skilled occupations, have jobs which exhibit a number of characteristics of good work. Self-employed homeworkers, more often women, have lower job quality but leisure satisfaction benefits. Mobile working jobs offer greater spatial and temporal flexibility and job satisfaction, but also exhibit lower quality characteristics evident of trade-offs and divisions between forms of mobile work. Driving/travelling jobs exhibit lower job quality characteristics, especially among self-employed urban-based workers.
This paper aims to explore the impact of future flexible working model (FWM) evolution on urban environment, economy and planning. Working models are changing, evolving over several decades towards flexibility and mobility. Major cities are witnessing emerging alternative workplace models, such as coworking spaces, digital working hubs, on-demand spaces, and office clubs. These trends inevitably bring significant changes of flexible working hours, modified workplace business operations, different urban facilities requirements, and new workplace location options. However there remains a lack of understanding of the impact of such flexible modern workplaces on urban development. To address this issue, the current paper adopts a systematic literature review method, discusses the historical evolution and various types of FWM, and explores the impact of such FWMs on urban environment, economy and planning. This research leads to enhanced understanding, planning and management for the future challenges of next-generation working models in major cities, and brings potential direct benefits to urban development and the economy. Keywords: Flexible working model, Systematic literature review, Urban environment, Economy, Urban planning
The case study approach allows in-depth, multi-faceted explorations of complex issues in their real-life settings. The value of the case study approach is well recognised in the fields of business, law and policy, but somewhat less so in health services research. Based on our experiences of conducting several health-related case studies, we reflect on the different types of case study design, the specific research questions this approach can help answer, the data sources that tend to be used, and the particular advantages and disadvantages of employing this methodological approach. The paper concludes with key pointers to aid those designing and appraising proposals for conducting case study research, and a checklist to help readers assess the quality of case study reports.
This paper starts from the premise that regional planning as it is known is now defunct and something that we need to get used to. Identifying those disruptive elements that have undermined traditional forms of institutionalized regional planning, it is argued that contemporary planning debates are too obsessed with the institutional planning frame and have become distracted from the changing content of the real-world picture. The aim in this paper is to reassert the purpose and values of planning by rediscovering the content, conceptualize multiple and fluid forms of planning frames, and reposition the planner as an orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures.
The COVID-19 crisis has changed the face of many of our cities and questioned how we should manage urban life in the wake of a pandemic. This Commentary points to the need to learn urban governance lessons and to the potential value of urban experimentation in crisis.
This paper considers the influence of established local planning cultures and legacies on the trajectory of contemporary local development policies. Local and sub-regional planning cultures are interpreted as overall ‘developmental frames’ which set the context for local planning approaches both through more concrete territorial, developmental and policy forms and through cognitive structures, assumptions and values. These frames then exert significant influence on how planning policy is conceived and enacted, with potentially major implications for local development outcomes. Three illustrative case studies are presented from sub-regional growth areas in the South East of England.
In the wake of the global financial crash of 2007–2008, many governments have sought to streamline their post-war planning systems and encourage faster project delivery. Expedited decision-making is equated with efficiency and the meeting of broader growth objectives, whereas slower and more complex forms of engagement are presented as an impediment and a governmental problem to be solved through reform. For critical authors such as Weber, such approaches are fraught with danger. The core objective of planning systems should, conversely, be focused on the production of ‘slow cities’, in which decision-making times allow time for proper democratic and judicial-technical oversight of development processes. Slow planning, it is claimed, can limit the negative impacts of rapid development on urban built environments and communities. In this paper, we draw on research in London to examine the relationships between the temporalities of planning, project outcomes and the politics of time. We argue that within urban studies there needs to be a stronger emphasis on the temporal dimensions of governance and the politics of time. We highlight the conditions in and through which temporal resources are deployed strategically in urban planning and assess the ways in which powerful, reflexive and time-resourced developers and investors use planning timeframes to boost returns over the longer term. We conclude by setting out agendas for future research and for more variegated and contextualised explorations of fast and slow planning processes.
Until recently, knowledge-intensive work activities have predominantly taken place in office buildings as a specialized form of economic infrastructure. New digital technologies together with an economic and organizational transition from closed firms to open platforms has changed the pattern of work within the modern metropolis. The office building is no longer the sole workplace typology and work activity has intensified in other urban locations. The questions then are: “How might smart cities reinterpret workplace culture at the urban scale outside the framework of office buildings typology?“ and “Which tools and methodologies can be used to make digital workplace culture visible at the urban scale?“ In order to answer these questions, workplaces are observed not as private architectural spaces but as compositions of “subjective urban experiences“. A Twitter data analysis provides evidence of workplace spatial culture within the innovative global cities of Amsterdam, London and Paris, interpreted as behavior settings. This analysis shows that office pattern locations are generally distributed independently to knowledge intensive business services and workplace demand, as expressed through social media analyses. In addition to office buildings, transit hubs, urban amenities and new digital services play a key role in reframing workplace location. Moving beyond generic visions for digital work in outer spaces, big data therefore provides specific insights and incentives for considering workplace design at the urban scale.
Coworking spaces (CWS) and the associated practice of coworking, have emerged in numerous forms and various urban contexts to critically challenge traditional concepts of the workplace and location of creative work, while simultaneously confronting the way in which creative workers interact with and relate to each other as well as with space and to place. Heralded as a solution to increasingly atomised work patterns, CWS are imagined and presented as spaces of serendipitous encounter, spontaneous exchange and collaboration. Nonetheless, little is known about how coworking positively supports workers and how coworking relates to wider urban transformation
processes has been largely un-researched. This paper contributes to a critical discussion through empirical analysis of a project aimed at establishing new creative CWS in city-centre locations across SE England. The study adopts a novel approach using Q-methodology. Motivations for coworking and benefits (or dis-benefits)
of co-location are assessed, as is the extent to which coworking facilitates interactional effects and wider neighbourhood interactions. In particular, the role of the CWS manager as “mediator” is explored. Coworker benefits relate primarily to peer-interaction and support rather than formal collaboration. While CWS managers play a key connecting role, also ensuring coworker complementarity and compatibility, the coworker profile (motivations, needs, experiences) ultimately influences outcomes. The study cautions against the use of CWS as “quick fix” urban renewal tools, with little indication that the benefits of coworking reach beyond immediate members or that linkages are easily established between coworkers and local (resident or business) communities.
Purpose
Telecommuting continues to be a topic of interest for practitioners and researchers alike. There are significant numbers of employees currently involved in telecommuting around the globe. Organizational implications, global workforce implications and the scarcity of scholarly publications make this research topic one that warrants our further investigation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature to identify the substantive work, examine the state of this phenomenon as of to date, particularly the failure and success factors, provide valuable insight to the practitioners and research directions to researchers
Design/methodology/approach
An extensive literature review was conducted in an effort to identify the significant, substantive work to date. We reviewed two major business data bases and limit our review to refereed journals because of the rigorous review process that these articles go through before publication.
Findings
A schema was identified to help categorize topics found in the literature. A framework model is proposed to further explore the relationships between the motivating factors for telecommuting and the resulting outcomes from telecommuting programs.
Practical implications
The literature review and the model should be useful information for both practitioners and researchers in a variety of disciplines including management, communication, and information technology.
Originality/value
Few published papers have attempted to thoroughly review the telecommuting literature. Many of the articles concentrate solely on the individuals who telework. This review, looks at many facets of the telecommuting phenomenon like the workers, their managers, the organization as well as the technological and environmental issues.
The Value of Planning
- D Adams
- C Watkins
- ADAMS D.
“Third places” as community builders
- S Butler
- C Diaz
- BUTLER S.
Escape to the country
- C E Goode
- GOODE C. E.
The flexible future of work
- Business
The future of work after COVID-19
- Lund S. Madgavkar A
- Manyika J
- Smit S
- K Ellingrud
The Electronic Cottage: The Third Wave
- A Toffler
- TOFFLER A.
SWDP review preferred options consultation
- Swdp
- South
- Development Plan