Working from home or in coworking spaces: which telecommuting practice better contains urban sprawl ?

Rémy Le Boennec () and Nicolas Juste ()
Additional contact information
Rémy Le Boennec: MATRiS - Mobilité, Aménagement, Transports, Risques et Société - Cerema - Centre d'Etudes et d'Expertise sur les Risques, l'Environnement, la Mobilité et l'Aménagement - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université
Nicolas Juste: Cerema - Centre d'Etudes et d'Expertise sur les Risques, l'Environnement, la Mobilité et l'Aménagement, MATRiS - Mobilité, Aménagement, Transports, Risques et Société - Cerema - Centre d'Etudes et d'Expertise sur les Risques, l'Environnement, la Mobilité et l'Aménagement - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The widespread adoption of working from home arrangements in the wake of the pandemic has enabled firms to save on office space. However, it has also required additional floor space to support telecommuting activities. These activities can be carried out at home or in coworking spaces, raising questions about the impact of telecommuting in its various forms on urban sprawl. Because of the negative implications of urban sprawl, such as excessive ground artificialization near urban areas, increased travel distances, and negative transportation-related externalities, local authorities have been seeking greater control over city size. In this paper, we use a standard urban economics model to evaluate how urban sprawl can be contained in the context of telecommuting. We compare two scenarios: households telecommuting at home versus in coworking spaces. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, both scenarios lead to city expansion compared to the reference case without telecommuting. Second, the coworking scenario demonstrates superior urban sprawl containment compared to working from home. Third, the working from home scenario exhibits higher levels of agglomeration economies than the coworking scenario. This may encourage firms to promote working from home, despite its lesser ability to contain urban sprawl.

Keywords: Urban economics; Urban sprawl; Coworking; Working from home; Telecommuting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in WCTR 2026 - World Conference on Transport Research, Jul 2026, Toulouse, France

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05787102

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().