Approach

Today, remote working is mostly conceived as an arrangement enabling flexible work organisation. However, REMAKING contends that remote work can be more than that. If the multiple effects induced by remote work on individuals, business models and the socioeconomic sphere are properly understood and addressed by policymakers, it might become a lever contributing to shaping ongoing social, economic, and spatial structural changes.

REMAKING aims to deliver a policy-oriented framework reflecting the new and multi-faceted realities of remote working, facilitating policymakers to adopt place-based policies balancing the opportunities and risks of remote working and sharing practices to foster mutual learning on remote working in the novel scenario of megatrends and shocks. 

The project attempts to explore remote working from a different and original angle, i.e. the multiple effects exerted on three main societal dimensions: 

  1. the individuals’ living and working conditions, employment arrangements, actual and potential effects on work-life balance, and on individual identities; 
  2. the reconfiguration of business and public organisations, with a general trend of platformisation as the main challenge deriving for the spatially dispersed form of production and work organisation, both in private and public organisations; 
  3. the social and economic structure and the institutional responses offered by local public policies and bodies. Since remote working is becoming an established way of working across the EU post-pandemic, REMAKING believes that the challenges and multiple impacts yielded by remote working call for rigorous studies and analyses to support decision-makers in balancing opportunities and problems for a potential rethinking of their territories. 

These objectives will be achieved through participatory research activities across 4 case studies, each addressing a different form of remote working: digital nomadism, post-pandemic, high-skilled in hi-tech sectors and enforced remote workers. REMAKING will investigate the multiple impacts of remote working from the perspective of second-tier cities and rural areas and their evolving equilibrium with metropolitan areas, highlighting challenges, problems, and opportunities that policymakers might decide to address.