For years, the flexible workspace industry has been measured in numbers that fit neatly on a spreadsheet: desk occupancy, revenue per square foot, membership renewals. They matter, of course they keep the lights on. But according to fresh research from the University of Bath, the most consequential thing a coworking space produces may be precisely the thing that’s hardest to count.
The finding lands at a moment when the industry is being scrutinised from every angle. After a period of expansion, consolidation and the occasional high-profile collapse, operators and investors are once again asking what flexible workspace is actually for. The Bath team’s answer is quietly radical: coworking’s real product isn’t a desk. It’s the relationships that form around it.
Beyond the desk: what social capital actually is
Social capital is the value embedded in relationships and networks, the trust, knowledge and goodwill that allows people to access opportunities they couldn’t reach alone. It’s the reason a casual introduction can become a client, or a conversation over coffee can become a co-founder.
It’s also notoriously difficult to quantify. You can measure how many people walk through the door, but not how many walk out with a useful new contact. That measurement gap, the researchers argue, has led the industry to systematically undervalue its own output.
What the Bath research found
Allwork.Space spoke with Felicia Fai, Professor of Innovation and Regional Growth, and Phil Tomlinson, Professor of Industrial Strategy and Regional Development, both co-directors of the University’s Centre for Governance, Regions and Industrial Strategy (CGRIS). Their work, conducted with colleague Dr Mariachiara Barzotto, builds on years of study into how coworking spaces function as economic engines, not just real estate.
Their conclusion is that coworking spaces are powerful generators of social capital, and that this in turn supports innovation, skills development and wider economic activity. The mechanics are simple but easily overlooked: when people from different companies, sectors and stages of business share a kitchen, a printer and a patch of natural light, the everyday interactions that used to happen in a traditional office and that remote work quietly removed start to happen again.
Crucially, this isn’t accidental. The most effective spaces are intentionally designed to encourage it: layouts that nudge people past one another, programmes that introduce strangers, community managers who connect the dots. Social capital, in other words, can be engineered.
Why it matters beyond the big cities
Perhaps the most pointed part of the Bath team’s broader research agenda is its focus on what coworking can do outside major urban centres. If social capital is the key output, then a single flexible workspace in a smaller town or regional city isn’t just a convenience for local freelancers it’s infrastructure for the local economy.
The argument runs like this: small businesses and solo founders in regional areas often lack the dense professional networks that their city counterparts take for granted. A well-run coworking space can plug that gap, creating the conditions for value chains to form, skills to be shared and opportunities to circulate. Some co-workers, the researchers note, even begin to build value chains together, the social value of community translating, eventually, into hard economic value.
That reframing has obvious implications for policymakers interested in regional growth, and for operators weighing where to expand next.
What it means for operators and occupiers
For operators, the research is an invitation to stop selling square footage and start selling outcomes. A space that demonstrably builds connections through events, introductions and a genuine community, commands a premium that a commodity desk cannot. The community manager, long treated as a cost centre, may be the most valuable person on the payroll.
For occupiers, it’s a reminder that choosing a workspace is partly a procurement decision and partly a network decision. A freelancer weighing two similarly priced desks should probably ask which one is more likely to introduce them to their next client. A growing business weighing a traditional lease against a flexible one should factor in not just the rent, but the relationships that come bundled with it.
And for the wider industry, it’s a nudge to get better at telling this story. As long as coworking is judged only on occupancy and revenue, it will be valued only as real estate. The Bath research suggests it’s worth a great deal more than that if anyone bothers to measure it.
The takeaway
Flexible workspace has spent a decade being appraised like property. The University of Bath’s research makes a quietly compelling case for appraising it instead like infrastructure the kind that doesn’t just house work, but helps it happen. The desks are easy to count. The connections are where the value lives.
