How many coworking spaces are there in Germany? Until now, this question could not be answered clearly. Previous market surveys always referred to the entire shared workspace market, i.e., they also included business centers, serviced offices, and shared offices. Now, however, there is a reliable survey. The German »CoworkingMap,« which was launched last year, has recounted the figures and published an evaluation.
There are just over 700 coworking spaces in Germany, according to the CoworkingMap team. They define a coworking space as a place where are ›office workstations, team offices, and workshop-meeting rooms for temporary or longer-term use with present community management.‹ This distinguishes coworking spaces from other shared workspaces, which they broadly group all together as office communities.
This number looks pretty realistic to me. But why? For one thing, because I keep my own list and come up with about 650 coworking spaces. The slight deviation from the CoworkingMap can be explained because I did not search as meticulously as the map creators, and I only counted entries in Google Maps. However, not all coworking spaces are entered there or can be found with the search term ›coworking‹.
On the other hand, I can compare with my map of East German coworking spaces, where there are already more than 100 entries. According to the CoworkingMap, there are 114 coworking spaces in Eastern Germany (excluding Berlin); I come up with 102 locations. One reason for this discrepancy may be a different assessment of an operator that I may not define as a coworking space, but the CoworkingMap makers do. A consequence of the blurring of what precisely a coworking space is.
The CoworkingMap numbers are close enough to the numbers I created that I consider them realistic. Besides, I also know and trust two of the CoworkingMap creators. Thomas Wick is the operator of the coworking space »Cobass« in Preetz in Schleswig-Holstein; Christer Lorenz has already collaborated with me on the East German coworking map. I have also interviewed both of them for the blog of the German Coworking Federation (GCF).
2 Comments