Coworking spaces and COVID-19 A South Korean perspective

the present chapter flls this gap in the literature by describing the renewed role of CSs during the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring the CS model in Asia, which has followed a diferent trajectory in the literature on economic restructuring, urban knowledge economy, and social capital compared to Western society (Kojo & Nenonen, 2014; Wang & Loo, 2017). Moreover, Asian economies reacted diferently to the pandemic. Governments responded to the pandemic by adopting centralized actions distinct from those used in Western countries (Fendos, 2020). For instance, to control the spread of the disease, South Korea adopted a rigorous contact-tracing programme comprising traditional shoe-leather epidemiology and new methods to track contacts by combining large databases (global positioning system, credit card transactions, and closed-circuit television) (Park et al., 2020). Given the diferent approaches to the COVID-19 outbreak and the diferent use of CS in Western and Eastern societies (among others, freelancers and employees of small companies as main users in the former and location-independent lifestyle entrepreneurs in the latter), this chapter explores the aspects of the pandemic that afected the prevalence of teleworking and CSs in urban contexts such as Seoul, South Korea, where COVID-19 has been successfully combated and eradicated since the early signs of the global outbreak. Teleworking was promoted by the government in this country years before the pandemic hit. We investigated the CS situation in Seoul, mainly performing desktop research that reviewed scholarly works, national policy documents, Korean newspapers, and CS websites. For triangulation purposes, our fndings were cross-referenced by discussing them with a South Korean CS manager and a South Korean researcher in this particular feld.