Covivio Real estate insights Experts views Could we be seeing an end to wasted m²?

Could we be seeing an end to wasted m²?

  • Office
  • Uses

Despite its apparent busyness, the city has so many empty spaces that are filled only intermittently. So intensifying the use made of existing buildings rather than building new ones would therefore seem to be a useful response to urban sprawl. Marie-Laure Leclercq de Sousa, Chief Executive Officer France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Southern Europe at JLL, explains the core principles around the intensification of workspace use (and its limits).

By emptying offices of their occupants, the Covid period has had a major impact on workspace design. “There’s now a widespread awareness of the need to use space sparingly. In the same way as our natural resources, floor space has become a resource whose use needs to be considered”, says Marie-Laure Leclercq de Sousa.

Creating single-use offices occupied by just one person now seems aberrant, despite the fact that, as she points out, the actual occupancy rate of offices is now estimated at between 30% and 40% across Europe, evenings and week-ends included. 

In the same way as our natural resources, floor space has become a resource whose use needs to be considered.

Marie-Laure Leclercq de Sousa
Chief Executive Officer France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Southern Europe at JLL

FOUR CORE PRINCIPLES

Against this background, building use intensification is changing the way we think about these spaces, based on four core principles.

Firstly, usage hybridisation in which some business spaces are made available for other uses during periods when they are not required to fulfil their primary function. For example, using company restaurants as training or meeting spaces outside mealtimes.

Then comes pooling, where the aim is to share a common space between different users. This is the flagship model for coworking and flex office working.

The third solution is a combination of the previous two based on the principle of chronotopy, a concept that combines the temporal (chrono) and spatial (topos) aspects all space usage. In this way, offices can potentially become accommodation at weekends, while meeting rooms or lecture theatres can be used as public meeting venues when employees are not using them.

The fourth and final core principle is reversibility, which involves considering the possible future uses of a site at the design stage to avoid locking it into a single use, so that former offices can be converted to housing or hotels, for example.

A challenging balancing act

However, there are a number of obstacles to the widespread application of these intensification principles. Combined with the diversity of public and private stakeholders involved, the sheer variety of shared spaces creates the need for bespoke solutions that are difficult to reproduce at scale. The way in which cities have historically been designed, and the cultural relationships that each country has with workspaces, are distinctive differences that are hard to overcome. “The people who make up the rich diversity of everyday working life don’t operate in the same way everywhere”, says Marie-Laure Leclercq de Sousa.