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The purpose of this paper is to explore what attracts individuals to live in a South East Asian city. It uses a boundaryless career approach that is interested in how people cross-traditional career boundaries, including those related to country and location barriers. Going beyond an individual and organizational view, a more extensive model of location decisions is developed that incorporates broad macro-factor career drivers.

A large-scale qualitative study explored individual, organizational, political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological, legal, natural and general drivers to live in the city. The authors interviewed 43 individuals who had moved to the city from abroad, were born in the city and still lived there or who were born in the city but had moved to another foreign city.

Many macro-contextual factors – i.e. day-to-day regulatory stability and transparency, economic growth, friendliness and meritocracy, safety and a good, clean environment – were seen as attractive by all three groups. People who had left the city raised some specific criticism regarding the vibrancy, freedom and creativity of thought.

The study focused on highly skilled individuals who most often had experience in living in different cities to get more reflective views. However, this restricted the generalizability. The findings nuance the understanding of boundaryless careers.

The research expands the normally used attraction factors and develops a broader framework of city attractiveness drivers. The emerging picture can be used by the city administration to manage its global attractiveness while increasing non-regulatory “stickiness” to retain talent.

The research has social implications with respect to cross-border boundaryless careers and talent acquisition, management and retention strategies.

The research expands the macro-contextual discussion and goes beyond the dominant focus on individuals and organizations when investigating boundaryless careers. The study uses an innovative method as it does not only interview foreign expatriates but also two further, more neglected groups: local citizens and individuals who had left the city. It develops an extended model of boundaryless location drivers and develops some exemplary propositions.

This paper aims to examine the learning gained from the evolving adjustment experiences of co-workers in moving to home-based working during the COVID-19 pandemic and the influence of these experiences on re-adjusting to return to co-working.

Results of a longitudinal qualitative study are reported where a group of co-workers were interviewed on three occasions between 2019 and 2022. Experiences are analysed alongside the adjustment to the remote work model using a boundary management lens.

The main adjustment experiences were in work location, temporal structures, professional and social interactions, and a new adjustment area was identified around family role commitment that emerged in the home-based setting. Boundary management practices were temporal, behavioural, spatial and object-related and evolved with the unfolding of adjustment experiences. A return to using co-working spaces was driven by the need for social interaction and spatial boundaries but affected by the requirement for increased privacy.

This paper will help workplace managers to understand adjustment experiences and develop facilities that will support a positive shared working environment not fulfilled through home-based working.

Although many workers abruptly transitioned to home-based working during the pandemic, this research considers those who would normally choose to work in a community-centred working environment rather than being home-based. As such, their experience of adjustment is of greater interest, particularly in terms of their expectations for shared working spaces.

This research aims to aggregate and categorise distinct places for multi-locational work from the 1960s until today. Based on an understanding of the user needs connected to these locations, the paper aims to identify the service concepts and workplace design solutions by which these needs can be met.

The literature review is based on academic journal papers, reports and books related to the topic.

The paper categorises the main multi-locational workplace locations, namely, organisational offices, home offices, mobile workplaces and flexible offices. The user needs in these locations vary from concept to concept, and therefore, the service offers are distinct. Based on the results, the service provision of organisational offices and flexible offices should focus on providing users with the chance for socialisation using collaborative space solutions and community management policies. In the cases of home offices and mobile workplaces, service provision should instead emphasise ensuring functionalities such as efficient virtual connectivity and accessibility. Additionally, more concept-specific user needs are identified.

The paper offers an overview of and framework for future research and concept development. The limitations of cultural differences could have been investigated more.

The results provide insight into the purposes of facilities management and workplace design when developing service concepts for multi-locational workplaces.

The paper establishes a literature-based framework for the service concepts of places for multi-locational work.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred major, and possibly enduring, changes in paid work. In this chapter, we explore the continuity and change in several work day dimensions, including where it is performed, the amount of time spent working, the length of the work day, and who people are with when they work, as well as variation across population subgroups. We use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to analyze change across the 2019 to 2021 period. While the shift to working primarily at home in 2020 is dramatic and continuing into 2021, working primarily at the workplace remains the modal experience for Americans. We find differences by gender, education, parental status, and age in which workers perform their jobs at home, and we find much more continuity in how much people work and when they work.

This paper aims to build on the presumption that defining the spatial solution of the activity-based office environment through user-centred interdisciplinary dialog would strengthen understanding of interdependencies between the environment and the worker. Secondly, this presumption also contributes to the idea that the shared and clarified concepts of a spatial solution through location-specific structuring, would support the research outcomes in being communicated to the design practice, and further improve the work environment design in the future. Thirdly, this supposition is that understanding, documenting and communicating of the interdependencies between the environment and the worker would contribute to increased interdisciplinary understanding, ultimately benefitting the end-user, the worker.

The driver of this conceptual paper is to encourage understanding across disciplinary boundaries and communication of work environment research results for implementation in design practice. The authors introduce an ecosystem-based approach to discuss the spatial solutions of activity-based office work environments. This approach is motivated by a need to understand the contradictory findings in former knowledge work environment research, such as ambiguities with shared concepts concerning interdisciplinary spatial discourse and shortcomings with user-centred methodologies in architectural design research. The transdisciplinarity forms the methodological framework of this paper, and it is reflected in relation to the design research approach Research by Design (RbD). RbD considers the professional designer’s viewpoint, which includes creative knowledge production, carrying out the operations of research in a real-life context with interdisciplinary interactions together with the worker’s user-experience.

The research outcome is the proposal of an activity-based office ecosystem-based approach, in which the physical environment is structured into two entities: architectural envelope and interior orchestration. In this twofold approach, both qualitative and quantitative contents are meant to be seen as part of the time-location-based framework of an office space. This integrative approach is intended to support the process of searching for understanding and unity of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. The twofold structuring also has an essential role in supporting methodological choices and the communication of the research outcomes both between disciplines and to design practice. The twofold model also has a role in engaging users as participants and evidence providers in the design or research processes.

The location-specific ecosystem-based approach of the physical work environment compiles of a twofold entity architectural envelope and interior orchestration. This approach supports affordance-based thinking, understanding the ecosystem’s complexity and underpins spatial documentation. Furthermore, this location-specific ecosystem-based approach enables communication of the research outcomes to the design practice and participation actions with the users.

Sustainable Accommodation for the New Economy (SANE) is a two‐year EC‐funded research programme considering the combined impact of the new economy on people, process, place and technology to identify new ways of accommodating work. Its focus is on the creation of sustainable, collaborative workplaces for knowledge workers across Europe, encompassing both virtual and physical spaces. The key operational goal of the project is to develop a unified framework for the design of sustainable workplaces in Europe. This multidisciplinary framework will generate designs that will allow distributed organisations to take full advantage of coming advances in location‐independent computing and ubiquitous networking SANE will broaden the range of workplace design parameters to include consideration of degrees of privacy and relations between physical and virtual spaces. By embracing considerations of public and private space, the workspace environment model developed will locate the office environment in the wider context of the sustainable urban development and the regeneration of European cities. This paper describes the work currently being undertaken by the SANE project’s Space Environment Modelling work package, which is led by DEGW. This work package focuses on the architectural aspects of the human environment in organisational settings. Other key theoretical packages are Human Environment Modelling, which examines communications and interaction in physical and virtual environments, and Processes and Tools, which will examine current and likely future technology tools and processes to support the distributed workplace.

This paper aims to explore the extent to which Covid-19 has challenged work habits and outcomes. The authors argue that after the lockdown period workers have been experiencing a new work mode called “Covid-working”. The aim is to provide a first interpretation of this phaenomenon and elaborate on future real estate strategies and workplace policies based on this experience.

Using survey data, this research analyses Covid-working in a large-sized company in Italy. The survey was answered by 90 employees and addresses three domains: locations of work; a comparison between work-from-home (WFH) and work from the office; and outcomes of Covid-working vs office-working.

With Covid-working, the workers of the case company drastically changed their traditional work from the office approach to pure WFH. While this abrupt switch might generate difficulties in adaptation, this working practice was generally appreciated by this company’s workers. Positive and negative outcomes of Covid-working confirm previous studies on remote working. Recommendations on multi-location of work, new value for the headquarters and diversity empowerment open up avenues for future real estate strategies.

Observations on Covid-working are still limited and mainly appear on grey literature, due to the newness of this phaenomenon. Empirical studies such as the proposed one can increase companies’ awareness of the positive and negative outcomes of this experience and support their future workplace strategies.

At issue in the debate over home employment is whether paid work performed in the home exploits workers or enables them to decide when and where to do their work. Converting the terms of the debate into a set of variables, I compare blue‐collar workers in manufacturing industries by work location. Although observed differences are open to varying interpretations, I conclude that as a group the home workers in this sample may be choosing to work at home. However, my analyses also demonstrate the diversity of home working arrangements, and that worker's ‘choices’ are socially shaped such that home employment has different meanings and consequences for different groups of workers. I further argue that the exploitative potential in home work cannot be dismissed because the findings are controversial, and the sample most likely underrepresents home workers, especially those most vulnerable to exploitation. Evidently, more research is necessary on the diversity of home working arrangements and their implications.