EU cities overrun in new co-working league table

The ‘freelance-friendly’ visas being urged for folk beyond Europe had better work both ways if British creatives ever want to sample the globe’s top cities for co-working after Brexit.

In fact, most of the 10 leading cities of the world for working collaboratively are located in non-EU nations, despite the dominance of London, which sits comfortably in first place.

Europe’s absence in the second set of top 10 cities for co-working is even more pronounced, as only a single one of those newly ranked between 11th and 20th is European (-- Stockholm).

'No surprise'

Five factors were used to inform the rankings, notably; the number of co-working spaces, average fee per space, number of start-ups, number of founders and broadband speed.

So it is “no surprise” that London is the top co-working space, says Daniel Pickering-Fletcher of luxury leather goods brand Aspinal, which compiled the rankings using three datasets.

It is also ‘unsurprising’ that Bangalore has the cheapest average workspace cost per month, he said, just £67, compared with £312 in London, and £276 in Paris (ranked 3rd overall).

Broadband

The other EU cities in the top 10 for co-working are Berlin (6th), where spaces cost a monthly average of £200; and Amsterdam (10th), at £178, the cheapest of the four leading EU cities.

The capital of the Netherlands looks relatively healthy for broadband speed too (average of 29.1 mbps), convincingly ahead of Berlin and on the heels of London (29.4) and Paris (30.4).

But every city in the table is trounced on broadband by Austin (ranked 15th overall), way out in front with Wi-Fi, as users in its co-working spaces are on a super fast average of 82.3 mbps.

'Adapting'

“It’s clear that cities around the world are adapting to changing times,” Mr Pickering-Fletcher said. “Working remotely and flexible hours are quickly replacing typical workdays to help people achieve a healthier work-life balance.”

Also ‘across the pond’ and scoring highly on broadband speed is Chicago (32.2), Boston (35.2) and Seattle (45.4), ranked seventh, eighth and eleventh overall, respectively.