Signals & Stats : Daily Signals

Space-squatting

By Jonathan Openshaw 01 : 07 : 2016 Spacious : Workplace Futures : Freelancers

New York – The co-working phenomenon is expanding to restaurant spaces that are not used during the day in a bid to tackle urban inefficiencies.

Start-up Spacious provides space hosts and free coffee, opening up restaurants before 5:00pm service begins
It estimates that more than 2,000 restaurants are closed during the day in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone

Spacious, New York

Co-working spaces have been one of the great success stories of recent years, from the US-founded £12bn ($16bn, €14.3bn) WeWork to the UK’s challenger brand Second Home. Existing offers tend to retain the office model of purpose-built spaces, but New York-based start-up Spacious does things differently.

Founded to tackle the issue of unused space in our urban centres, Spacious works with dinner-only restaurants to create appealing co-working spaces that would otherwise be empty during the day. Access to Spacious is available for £71.40 ($95, €85) per month, or £21.80 ($29, €26) per day, and users can also invite one guest per hour for free, with additional guests costing £4.50 ($6, €5.40) each per hour.

Spacious describes the concept as a reprogramming of urban space and plans to roll it out to other urban spaces that are inefficiently used. Host spaces will be carefully screened to ensure a high-quality co-working experience.