Mediating labour, creativity and innovation in the city: collaborative workspaces as middlegrounds and community as a service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines betahaus, a well-established coworking space in Berlin, widely recognised within the startup community. Using qualitative methodology, it unpacks the connections that are developed between freelancers, start-ups, and large firms, in a city rapidly transforming into a startup Mecca. Drawing on the framework of [Cohendet, P., Grandadam, D., & Simon, L. (2010). The anatomy of the creative city. Industry & Innovation, 17(1), 91–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/13662710903573869; Cohendet, P., Grandadam, D., & Simon, L. (2011). Rethinking urban creativity: Lessons from Barcelona and Montreal. City, Culture and Society, 2(3), 151–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2011.06.001]) who distinguish three layers of creative processes in local innovative milieus – the underground (freelancers, startup entrepreneurs), the middleground (coworking spaces, here betahaus), and the upperground (corporations), our study focuses on the micro – level, investigating the brokerage role and the different modes of intermediation that betahaus undertakes. Our findings reveal that betahaus operates as a broker, through events where the corporate world meets the gig-economy world; where creative individuals offer their innovative ideas and creativity, which is harnessed by the upperground, in exchange for access to worldwide networks and capital. betahaus mediates the multiple value exchanges; through these mediations it systematises the mechanisms that reproduce aspects of labour precarity and speculative labour, entrepreneurialism, and the commodification of community. The latter seems to be the epicentre of all value exchanges in the gig-economy and thus has been commodified, offered as a service without raising questions of reciprocity and mutuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".