Remote Work Spaces: exploring the geographies of digital freelancers in Athens

MSc Thesis by Alexandra Giannopoulou University of Amsterdam

Remote Work Spaces: Exploring the geographies of digital freelancers in Athens

Alexandra Giannopoulou Human Geography (Urban Geography) MSc Thesis Student Number: 13285122

Supervisor: Fenne M. Pinkster Second Reader: Tait Mandler

University of Amsterdam June 2021

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ABSTRACT The present thesis engages with the transforming world of labour and the new spaces of work that emerge. In the frame of the intense digitisation and the rise of remote work that have occurred even prior to the outbreak of COVID but also in a universal manner during the last year, remote work appears to gain increasingly permanent elements. Parallel to these changes, working relations have changed significantly and refrain from the employer-employee model while shifting towards freelancing. The new labour force that is created through these processes is accommodated in spaces whose nature is often hybrid, since they are not necessarily work-oriented, therefore the working experience is differentiated from that of a ‘conventional’ workspace. With the use of qualitative tools the thesis examines the specific geographies of digital freelancers in Athens, both before and during COVID, in an effort to explore the ways through which these people shape their worklife realities within a city that is still in the process of embracing the new world of labour.

Beyond the shared experience of homeworking and its intensification during COVID, the research emphasizes on the agency-driven strategies of workspace demarcation that make these geographies personalised. Τhe qualitative analysis provides insight on the workspace patterns, which appear as a puzzle of multiple spaces within which tensions may be created due to conflicting uses.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The completion of this Master’s program comes within what has been a very particular year for everyone. Having followed the entire program from my room in Athens instead of the campus of the University of Amsterdam, it has not always been easy to keep track of the courses and not get disappointed from the sometimes overwhelming conditions of the lockdown. Finishing my thesis, I would like to deeply thank my supervisor, Fenne Pinkster, for all her support and the always encouraging and motivating meetings we had. I would also like to thank my fellow students, Isene Boudrie, Nils Frankauer and Barbara Oliveira-Soares. The communication of our common worries and the sharing of feedback and thoughts made it resemble what could have been a ‘normal’ study year.

I believe the choice of my thesis subject derived from my own home confinement and switch to remote and entirely online life and this made me study with great interest the various subjects that emerged as I was trying to design the thesis. It has not always been easy to separate myself and my personal experience from my readings and my interviews. I would like to thank the interviewees, who during what was also for them a challenging period dedicated their time and energy in sharing their stories. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends who were there for the endless discussions about my thesis, the specification of the subject, the doubts and the ideas. Without them none of this would have been possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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LIST OF FIGURES

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I. INTRODUCTION

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II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1. Changes in the World of Work 1.1. Flexibilisation and Digitisation of Work: The emergence of the Gig Economy 1.2. The liquid times of gig workers 1.3. Cities as sites of digital work 2. New Spaces of Work 2.1. Homeworking 2.2. Coworking Spaces 3. COVID and Telework

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III. RESEARCH DESIGN 1. Research Aim and Research Questions 2. Methodology 2.1. Contribution 2.2. Methods and COVID limitations 2.3. Sampling and fieldwork process 3. Positionality and Ethical Considerations 4. Research context: the case of Athens 4.1. Setting the scene 4.2. Athens’ ‘ecosystem’ entering Greece 2.0 4.3. A few notes on the lockdown

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IV. PRE-COVID GEOGRAPHIES OF REMOTE WORK 1. Working arrangements 2. Navigating remote work routines in Athens 2.1. Coworking spaces 2.2. Cafes and other spaces 2.3. The changing relation with the city 3. Micro-geographies of homework: the desk as a battlefield 3.1. Housing structure 3.2. Distractions and disturbances 3.2. Perception of time

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V. RECONFIGURING THE GEOGRAPHY OF WORK UNDER COVID 1. Working remotely under the same roof 2. The dissolution of time

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VI. BOUNDARY SETTING STRATEGIES 1. Spatial boundaries 2. Temporal boundaries and ritual preservation 3. Digital boundaries

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VII. BEYOND WORKSPACE 1. The future of work and the flexibility of the remote model 2. Social life and socialisation through work

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VIII. CONCLUSIONS

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IX. DISCUSSION

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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APPENDIX: INTERVIEW GUIDE

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Fiverr advertisement……………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 12 Figure 2: Fiverr advertisement……………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 12 Figure 3: Map of Coworking Spaces in European cities……………………………………………………...………………. 24 Figure 4: Paul’s cafe work experience. ………………………………………………………………………………………...……... 28 Scheme 1: Spaces of work pre-COVID…………………………………………………………………………………………………... 40 Scheme 2: Spaces of work during COVID……………………………………………………………………………………………… 41 Scheme 3:The elements of homeworking……………………………………………………………………………………………. 43 Scheme 4: Spaces of work and coping strategies pre-COVID…………………………………………………………….. 43 Scheme 5: Spaces of work and coping strategies during COVID………………………………………………………… 44

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I. INTRODUCTION Telework has been a buzzword during the last decades, and ever since the COVID-19 breakout it has become a lived experience for a tremendous amount of people all over the world. Although inevitably established by the COVID restrictions, a series of economic and technological conditions have brought remote work into prominence prior to the special measures taken for the virus. As a significant amount of occupations is becoming more and more digitized, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled the spatial reconfiguration of work, management and organization (Halford, 2005) resulting in nearly the doubling of the percentage of people occasionally working from home in the EU-27 even during the decade of the 2010s (EU, 2020).

Simultaneously, a series of transformations in the field of labour have made it possible for telework to spread, since freelancing is on the rise and through this work relation people often disconnect from a fixed workspace provided by their employers.

In response to these transformations, new workspaces have emerged and their common thread can be retrieved in the element of hybridisation. Whether it is a home office or a coworking space, the boundaries between work and other aspects or spaces of life are becoming increasingly fluid. Whilst there is a significant amount of literature on either the experience of homeworking and the difficulties it involves, mainly regarding work-family conflict (Gurstein, 2001; Mahmood, 2007) or the emergence of new workspaces and the various ways these are organized (Spinuzzi, 2012; De Peuter et al., 2017; Avdikos & Iliopoulou, 2019; Bandinelli & Gandini, 2019; Gandini & Cossu, 2019), there is little focus in the generalised experience of people squeezing their work in spaces beyond that of a ‘conventional’ workspace. Although the interest towards the difficulties of remote work and the obligatory transformation of home into home office has gained significant attention during the COVID restrictions, the experiences of people already working remotely and the agency factors included in the process of optimizing their worklife geography are considered to be of great importance. These people, having already been a part of what is described as a new economy (Prassl, 2018; Jager et al., 2019), can provide us with the reasons that made them turn to telework as well as the experience of it, refraining from the obligatory lens of COVID while also giving insights on the transformation of their work during the restriction period.

This project will approach these issues focusing on the example of the city of Athens. While Athens does not function as a pioneer in the technological industry and the following facilities to support the ongoing progress in the world of work, it is considered to be a particularly interesting case.

Firstly, the economic crisis has been severe in the Greek context and Athens is under the process of reinventing forms of growth, promoting start-up businesses and aiming to attract investments during at least the last decade. In the domain under discussion, Greece is making steps towards the attraction of digital nomads, by introducing special visas while coworking and co-living projects are on the rise (Greece Is, 2019; TechCrunch, 2021). At the same time, the population is facing socio-economic recession and many have lost their jobs, therefore the search for alternatives is continuous and the exploration of the level of growth of freelancing in the context of the gig economy can be conducted in a still breeding ground. Lastly, Athens is considered to be particularly interesting exactly because of its secondary role in the global network of cities; literature on urban implications of technological and labour evolution usually seems to be limited within the scope of the leading cities in the field, leaving the rest unexplored and underrepresented. The aim of this

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research is to contribute to the deventering of urban studies by giving prominence to the changes that are happening in Athens which may not be as intense as they might be in the ‘leading’ cities, but severely affect the future of labour, the social relations and the urban environment of the city.

Building upon the aforementioned, the thesis will examine the processes of respatialisation and the experiences of hybridisation of workspaces for people located in Athens. Before posing the specific axes of the research, a theoretical section will be presented. It is considered critical to build the theoretical framework of the research upon the relation of space and labour, in order to proceed to the transformations in the field of labour and eventually describe the spaces that have been created or improvised to accommodate new working needs. Τhe case of Athens will be examined in order to set the context of the research and give prominence to the distinct elements that shape the labour reality of the city. Eventually, the thesis will attempt to answer how digital freelancers located in Athens organise and experience their labour geography.

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II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Space and labour have been interrelated and thoroughly studied mainly -but not solely- in the field of labour geography. Spaces of labour are core elements in the shaping of urban geography in the obvious manner that cities are the centers of labour institutions; beyond that, space and labour may shape geographies of various scales and aspects since both notions (and therefore their interrelations) are ubiquitous. Following Lefebvre’s (1991) perception of space, it is recognized that space is both the product of social relations and a factor that is involved in their shaping. The research aims to align with this perception of labour as a significant agent of social relations, using as key the interconnectedness of these notions.

Anwar & Graham (2020) highlight how central the notion of space is in labour geography research in many aspects such as the organization of production, institutional practices and more. Significant scholars in the field like Doreen Massey (1995) and David Harvey (1990) have studied the relations of labour and space over the last decades, interpreting the ways through which the global flows of capital create location factors for workers all over the world and how the latter are affected by the continuous processes of the transformation of capital(ism). However, scholars who are both supporting and rejecting Marxist theory tend to analyze these aspects of geography mostly through the lens of capital(ists) and the ways through which they shape the making of geography. In an effort to give prominence to the lack of insights from the side of the workers, Herod (1997;3) elaborates on the importance of recognizing that ‘workers, too, are active geographical agents whose activities can shape economic landscapes in ways that differ significantly from those of capital’. As will be examined below, in contemporary work arrangements this view can be even more relevant since there is a significant shift towards self-employment refraining from the employer-employee model. As a result, apart from an overview of the evolution of work, this study endeavours to examine the angle of space and geography production on behalf of individuals, to the admittedly limited extent that can be perceived as separate from capital flows and market agents.

The following section will make an effort to better define new work relations and the changing nature of the ‘hired worker’ and the ‘independent freelancer’.

1. Changes in the World of Work 1.1. Flexibilisation and Digitisation of Work: The emergence of the Gig Economy The ongoing transformation of the labour market has been described by scholars and journalists as a revolution in the field (Prassl, 2018:3). Many fields of labour are becoming more and more digitised, enabling the re-organisation of corporate structures. At the same time, there has been a significant rise in freelance professions as companies aim to disconnect from stable working relations with their employees, towards a direction of not providing benefits or being held responsible for the satisfaction of their employees, a fact that leads to the establishment of new work arrangements. As a result, on one hand digitisation introduces a global geography of labour (Prassl, 2018), where job seekers are becoming less and less dependent on location while the spatial mismatch between them and their potential employers is reduced (Galperin & Greppi, 2017). On the other hand, Jager et al. (2019) also attribute this transformation of the labour market to globalization and the related topic of labour migration, since there is an effort on behalf of large corporations that operate internationally to offer employment positions in regions which either provide financial advantages for them or have much lower wages established. These transformations have led to the

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establishment of various work arrangements and there has been an interest on behalf of scholars for their examination.

The main focus of this examination is shifted towards the ‘gig economy’, also referred to as ‘platform economy’, a term which aims to describe the working relations that are based on the conduction of -mainly digital- tasks on behalf of self-employed workers without any further commitment to the company. This characterisation aims to mirror this work arrangement to a music band’s ‘gig’, a metaphor that easily brings the notion of precarity in the front. As Prassl (2018) describes, the gig economy started out as a small niche for digital ‘crowdwork’ but grew into a global phenomenon including major companies and a continuously growing number of freelancers in quest for their next gig. It can be stated that the gig economy represents an ‘important and strategically consequential branch of global capitalism’ (Vallas & Schor, 2020:16.3) since it includes not only the digital exchange of goods and services but also a rapidly growing path of job hunting. The public debate that surrounds the gig economy is intense and divided between those who interpret it as the innovative reinvention of labour markets and the facilitation of goods and services exchange through a more sustainable model, and those who on the other hand see the extensive deregulation of the free market and its penetration in even more aspects of daily life (Prassl, 2018).

The various taxonomies among the professions and work relations that emerge within the gig economy can be blurry and overlapping but some core distinctions based on the level of expertise required or that of income can help improve our perception on this newly emerging field. Vallas & Schor (2020) suggest that there are five categories of labour within the gig economy, starting from the ‘upper strata’ of a platform’s architects or technologists -and most often owners-, followed by professionals with technical skills who offer their services for the improvement or addition of content. The next category includes offline labour and refers to those who conduct the final part of a platform service, such as food delivery or care work. The last two categories refer to micro-tasking or crowdworking, the most underpaid sector of the gig economy, followed by the unpaid labour by content producers of influencers who aspire to gain prominence and eventually revenue through this path.

There are numerous means of labour quest, competition but also networking among each of the aforementioned categories. Excluding the upper and the lower strata of the pyramid described above, scholars argue about the distinction among online professionals with technical skills and crowdworkers, which appear to be closely interrelated and create a conflict on the crowd-talent bipole (Pongratz, 2018; Prassl, 2018). On one hand, the term ‘crowdwork’ mainly refers to microtasks conducted by low-paid workers in developing countries who are employed by global firms aiming to reduce expenses, using a global pool of labour rather than their preexisting internal workforce (Rani & Furrer, 2020). The status of these workers is that of an ‘independent contractor’, meaning that the company offers short-term contracts that refer only to a specific task and most often include severe wage dumping (Jager et al, 2019). The pool of gig workers with professional technical skills functions in a similar way, since a large number of professionals who belong mostly in the ICT and creative sector are subscribed to online platforms (UpWork, Freelancer etc.) and build their profiles in order to attract possible job offers. As Pongratz (2018:58) explains, ‘contrary to their blanket characterisation as an anonymous crowd in previous academic debate, in most cases, online workers are forced to present themselves as talented experts to distinguish themselves from the mass of competitors.’

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In both cases, the lack of regulations for the protection of workers is prevalent, while the fact that workers are renting out their own capacities transforms work into the commodity per se - what Prassl (2018) describes as ‘humans as a service’. The significant difference from the preexisting forms of freelancing is that gig workers do not enjoy the privileges of service providers who are able to set their prices or agree on terms and conditions that suit their needs, therefore companies are enabled to hire people for a limited timeframe which may vary from a few months to a few minutes, while the employer carries no obligation related to social security or compensation after firing. People working in the digital freelancing domain may therefore vary in the class spectrum, from being part of low economic strata facing extreme precarity, to being members of the ‘elite’ of their category, embracing a flexible lifestyle as digital nomads, travelling around the world with their laptops, liberated from fixed workplace and transferring their work wherever their screen is.

1.2. The liquid times of gig workers There is great interest in the discourse production around the gig economy and the paradoxes that arise from its celebration and rebranding on behalf of market agents. The fragmentation of labour can be perceived in a wider context of liquidation of several aspects of life, where notions, thoughts, plans and actions cannot be perceived as stable and are treated as a set of parts that are not shaped as a whole. Bauman (2007;3) elaborated on the concept of liquidity by stating that the very notion of society is in our times fragmented and eventually ‘perceived as a matrix of random connections and disconnections of an essentially infinite volume of possible permutations’. In his work on liquid times, Bauman (2007) explains how the fragmentation of life stimulates orientations that cannot be planned entirely and are rather constant reactions to new data and new conditions where the individual is called to adapt, prioritizing their availability over their preference. The interpretation of Bauman can be correlated to the changing nature of work relations as described in the context of the gig economy and the general augmentation of freelancing. This reality inherently contains precarity, since the guarantee of a stable income is absent and any sort of long-term planning can be risky.

Within this extremely fragmented work practice, websites hosting profiles of gig workers (who are, in fact, antagonists) are increasingly using terminology around the notions of ‘community’, ‘tribe’ and so on. Thus, an individual who aims to enter the entrepreneurial world and does so at their own risk and under significant precarity, is reassured that there is a community to enter within. Rossi (2016;159) highlights how ‘the sense of excitement about belonging to a community that characterizes start-up entrepreneurs is central to the revitalization of capitalism as a ‘happiness industry’ (Davies, 2015; see also Ahmed, 2010) after the suffering connected with the economic crisis and the age of austerity’. However, as Pongratz (2018) highlights, online workers are expected to present themselves in an attractive way through personalised profiles that lead to the easy selection on behalf of the customers, who compare profiles and decide upon the most suitable for their task, usually counting on a rate system from previous customers. Due to this structure, the competitional angle of these platforms is much more intense than the collaborative or communal one. At the same time, the promotion of gig working platforms is based on the celebration of excessive work and its redefinition as a positive element, as shown in the advertisements of Fiverr, an online freelance platform (Figures 1&2).

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Figures 1,2. Fiverr advertisements. Figure 2 (right) is located at a New York City subway station, and the words “Join a union! Fight together for higher pay!” are written on top. Source: The New Yorker, 2017

Correlating the terminology of these platforms to the notion of liquidation as described above, some connections can be made. The boundaries between the notion of community versus what can be seen as a pool of antagonists are getting significantly blurry. Similarly, the hours devoted to build up a good and competitive profile or to continuously renew technical skills through self-paid seminars or online courses are not perceived as worthy of being paid for, therefore the boundaries between personal time - work time, freelance flexibility - work precarity and many more questionable dialectics are also becoming increasingly liquid. Aroles et al. (2021:1) comment on the paradoxical relationships that grow within this new world of work, as the depiction and perception of the new work reality is often examined as ‘increasingly fragmented, individualized, digitalized, entre/intrapreneurial, gig-oriented and compartmentalized for the sake of flexibility, speed and integration’ while collaborative techniques or spaces and sensibilities are central. The authors explain this contradicting condition as a result of the changing notion of community and collaboration which are eventually described as ephemeral relations within a utopian approach of ‘cool, atmospheric, apolitical construct’. The element of collaboration requires the continuous reinvention of possibilities by those who are part of the new world of work, who may put effort into inventing counter-hierarchical structures without necessarily perceiving collaboration as a condition requiring shared routines, public facilities, institutions and so on. Eventually, as will be elaborated below, these communities resemble more to a set of individuals following similar paths while remaining disconnected from each other.

1.3. Cities as sites of digital work In order to comprehend the geographies that these labour transformations create, it is considered necessary to turn to the role of cities in shaping new labour relations as well as the impact of these relations within the urban environment. Cities are perceived to be key in the evolution of capitalist economies, condensing the economic centers with the social complexities while functioning as a

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field for both the downturns and the recoveries of the economies that function within them. As mentioned above, the new world of work is reliant on the ICT and the creative sectors and urban centers are closely related with both of them, even before the emergence of new work arrangements, in the context of the ‘cognitive-cultural economy’ (Scott, 2011). The cultural and creative fields are becoming increasingly central in growth strategies of cities and the professionals engaged within these fields are considered to be key to urban regeneration processes (i.e. gentrification) since the last decades of the 20th century. When it comes to the technological field, Rossi & Di Bella (2017:1014) highlight the importance of cities for the technology-based economies, noting how ‘cities and particularly the major metropolitan centres acting as engines of national economies have become the social factories of global capitalism’. Indeed, it is in cities that the new world of work initially spatialised, finding breeding ground both from the communicative and knowledge nexus cities provide and from the infrastructure available.

Flexible and remote work was initially and informally spatialised in cafes, followed by the emergence of coworking spaces during the decade of 2010 which predominantly developed in urban centers around the world (Merkel, 2015). During these years and as flexible working arrangements are spreading rapidly, cities host new working spaces and habits that increasingly change the urban structure, even in some cases affecting the directions of urban planning (Yu et al., 2019). This increasingly rapid transformation creates a two-level condition. First, the preexisting uses of the urban landscape as we know it are no longer as firm and many spaces are becoming hybrid, aiming to include a place of work in places that have a different primary use, such as the cafe or the home, or aiming to create a sense of a hybrid atmosphere, such as the coworking space, which may often resemble more a cafe than an office. Scholars highlight how it is significant to pay closer attention to these changes, since the rise of homeworking or the emergence of coworking spaces mark a radical change of daily life that might for example translate into the transformation of what was considered to be a solely residential space into a place of work as well (Reuschke & Ekinsmyth, 2021).

Secondly, this condition is leading to the construction of yet another level of competition among cities and new hierarchies are being established as more and more cities enter the map of the digital economy. Due to the augmented mobility of digital freelancers and the inherent flexibility of new work arrangements, it is an aspiration of many cities to attract these freelancers along with the financial, social and cultural capital they carry. Within this context and with the tools of creativity, innovation and technology, cities aim to promote their ‘creative’ and ‘remote friendly’ aspect, while numerous platforms have emerged for the evaluation and ranking of appropriate cities for remote work (Nomadlist, TheHomeLike and more). These rankings usually nominate the already established ‘global cities’, i.e. the predominant cities in the growth of global capitalism, as top in their list.

However, the criteria are not solely growth-centered and due to the fact that many digital freelancers seek to work from places while being on vacation, many tourist destinations, such as Bali in Indonesia, have become prominent within the digital nomad trend.

In addition, the aforementioned processes of outsourcing on behalf of global firms create nodes in the digital economy market that enjoy tax benefits and in some cases allow companies to establish branches that also attract a labour force which adopts new work habits. Such is the case of Tbilisi, in Georgia, or Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. These cities saw a significant growth in their start-up market (StartUpRanking, 2021) followed by tax regulations that supported the investment of 13

international companies and the establishment of coworking spaces, hubs and business centers (Emerging Europe, 2020). These transformations leave a mark on the urban environment and can be perceived as parts of processes which Rossi & Di Bella (2017) refer to as ‘start-up urbanism’.

2. New Spaces of Work Following the description of the urban transformations that occur, scholars have begun to study the re-spatialisation of work (Halford, 2005). This chapter will focus on the specific spaces that are used for work and the tensions that rise within each. The new spaces of work vary among the home, third spaces like cafes or public spaces and coworking spaces. Depending on the field of the profession and the income it provides, digital freelancers may work in one or a combination of the aforementioned places, creating a variety of workspace patterns that seem to be shaped as hybrid spaces.

Working from cafes or third spaces is the least examined aspect of the re-spatialisation of work, probably because such spaces cannot be used as long-term workspaces. However, as more and more people are attached to their laptop and their digital needs, cafes tend to accommodate the need for working both through the most common offer of free Wi-Fi and through the availability of workstations or plugs for customers’ laptops. Moreover, cafes are important social spaces since even if there is no physical interaction with another person, they are spaces of observation for many, creating the sense of being in the public. As a result, even though cafes may not draw attention as new spaces of work, it can be seen in the urban environment that many people choose to work from such spaces sporadically or systematically, a condition that marks the hybrid nature these spaces embrace.

2.1. Homeworking Homeworking or WFH (working from home) has emerged before the transformations in the world of work and the intensification of freelancing. During the last decades, many companies offered the option of working from home some days per week, as a means to boost the employers’ productivity through the creation of more relaxing conditions and many employees aimed to partially practice it for the same reasons (Gurstein, 2001). Despite the fact that homeworking has been been put forward as a possible solution to work-family balance, numerous scholars question the degree to which this applies and highlight the tensions and conflicts homeworking creates (Gurstein, 2001; Wapshott & Mallett, 2012; Mahmood, 2007; Tremblay et al, 2018; Koslowski et al. 2019.). The findings of Tremblay et al. (2018) demonstrate that people work from home mostly because of work obligations themselves, rather than balancing purposes. Gurstein (2001) also evaluates the assumption that homeworking is a condition of work-family balancing as a misconception, while she highlights how even from the late 1980s homeworkers have been struggling to define the parameters of their home/work interface.

The need for further exploration about the fusion of work and home is created, since the conflict of uses squeezed in the same space may prove problematic. First, there is a prevalent danger of intensified work schedules due to lack of clear boundaries between both work-space and work-time. Mahmood (2007) explains several temporal and spatial strategies of individuals in order 14

to deal with multi-tasking, practicing boundary placement by imposing what the author calls ‘technologies of self’. Those strategies vary depending on class, gender, household composition, household members’ practices, the nature and motive of homeworking as well as the spatial affordances of work settings. Homeworking can be an unequal practice in terms of class; workers of lower economic strata are expected to live in smaller apartments and not have the spatial comfort of those in upper economic strata.

Homeworking is also rather obviously unequal in terms of gender and household composition.

Gurstein (2001;47) describes how homeworking mothers in the late 1980s would ‘miss the camaraderie of the office and the perks that made them feel like ‘adults’’ while one of the interviewed men recognized how his involvement in childcare or housekeeping was minor, making it easier for him to devote to his work without distractions. Especially in contexts with strict gender norms and prevalent gender roles, homeworking ‘may promote a traditionalised division of labour resulting in hindering rather than supporting gender equality.’ (Chung & Van der Lippe, 2018;12). It can be stated that the primary tension that is created during homeworking is the conflict of roles one might have, especially when having a family. The work-family balance is significantly challenged and despite the fact that it can initially be considered to be helpful for a working parent to spend more time at home, while gaining the lost commuting time, this may not always be achieved.

Tietze & Musson (2005) also refer to another issue that emerged in their research which is referred to as the ‘ontological limbo’. Homeworkers may grow a feeling of a constant ‘in-between’ state, where they do not feel like they are at work but they also do not feel like they are at home, therefore none of their roles that each space attributes to them can be practiced satisfactorily. The feeling of ‘in-between’ also functions towards working more, since the environment of the home can make it more difficult to stop working or to conduct additional tasks after a non-productive workday, while it is possible to be absent from work and from home at the same time. Koslowski et al. (2019) highlight the process of boundary placing strategies on behalf of individuals in order to negotiate and minimize that limbo. These strategies can focus on space, time, psychology, behaviour or any other aspect that helps the individual to align themselves with either the work or the home reality in a manner that aims to find the balance between the two.

2.2. Coworking Spaces Unlike the space of the home, coworking spaces are a newly emerged category of workspaces.

Largely discussed by scholars and journalists over the last years (among others: Merkel, 2015; Spinuzzi et al. 2018; Gandini & Cossu, 2019; Avdikos & Iliopoulou, 2019; Avdikos & Pettas, 2021;), coworking emerges as a new work practice that continuously gains ground and is more than often fused with homeworking. Coworking spaces came as a solution to the isolation of homeworking, the lack of facilities of cafes and the need for communication, interaction and networking among freelancers (mostly in the creative industry) and were perceived as ‘third spaces’ between home and work. Within a decade, they evolved into a ‘neo-corporate’ model aiming to host flexible, knowledge and gig workers of the technological sector (Gandini & Cossu, 2019).

Generally, coworking spaces are divided into the bipolar of community led or market led -also referred to as entrepreneurial-led (Avdikos and Iliopoulou, 2019)-, although Avdikos and Pettas

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(2021) refer to the existence of hybrid, in-between formations that need further research. Overall, the coworking idea is based on the notion of ‘co-‘: community, collaboration, shared space as well as openness and sustainability (Coworking Manifesto, upd. 2020). Indeed, despite the numerous variations, the common thread appears to be the notion of community (Spinuzzi et al. 2018) and the lack of hierarchy (indicatively, De Peuter et al. (2017:688) state how coworking spaces are perceived as ‘no-collar’ workplaces). However, most coworking spaces and especially the ones falling into the market-led category are often described in the literature as spaces where people ‘work alone together’ (Spinuzzi, 2012).

Bandinelli and Gandini (2019), in their analysis on creative hubs describe this situation as ‘collaborative individualism’, in the sense that coworking spaces primarily function so as to ‘offer a symbolic milieu whereby the values of community and collaboration are translated into a productive ethos that aligns with the transactional form of the interaction required in the creative economy’ (2019:91). The authors claim that coworking spaces have a ‘heterotopic’ substance, serving as the space of the necessary networking within the creative industry, however they characterize the collaborative element as imaginary. Having largely been absorbed or rebranded by industry titans such as WeWork, a large number of market-led coworking spaces function throughout the globe as workspaces for rent, some at quite unaffordable prices and without the presence of collaboration among the users.

Avdikos and Iliopoulou (2019), demarcate the differences that emerge in the case of ‘community-led coworking spaces’. These spaces are described by the authors as ‘not-for-profit ventures that accommodate (in semi-permanent terms) a small number of creatives with a kind of social and even political proximity between them.’ (2019;112). Adding to that, there is a significant body of literature that correlates the current coworking / collaborative rise as an expression of commoning practices.

Azzellini (2016) opens the wide discussion of the comeback of the commons through the lens of labour. The author explains how on one hand the commons are rebranded and utilized by market actors, while on the other hand work formations such as workplace recuperations emerge as anti-paradigms: ‘The discourse of the commons is increasingly pervasive today. Private businesses present ‘sharing economy’ as a commons, integrate commons into the market or have them producing for the market. While historically capital preyed on the commons with enclosures, the current trend is to utilize them. […]Workplace recuperations entail the transformation of a hierarchically structured capitalist business, which pursues primarily the increase of surplus value, into a democratically self-managed company with the workers‟ well-being at its centre.” (2016:765-768).

De Peuter et al. (2017:687) also highlight the inherent social and political ambivalence of coworking discourses, recognizing that the current form of coworking is ‘increasingly commodified and ultimately reinforces labour flexibilization’, as neoliberal norms recapitulate the counter-corporate identity of coworking.

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3. COVID and Telework During the last year, the impact of the pandemic has been massive in the labour sector and a very significant amount of the global population has switched to remote work. The aftermath of the pandemic cannot be predicted, since it is still an ongoing situation; nor can the impact on the field of labour be calculated since the up until now one-year remote experience may not be sufficient for a complete change of labour relations as we know them. However, an overview of the labour reality within the pandemic is useful in two manners. First, remote work became a lived experience for many people to a degree which resembles a global experiment for telework and its evaluation by those who practiced it. Second, COVID forced large companies to embrace the digital transformation in an unprecedented manner and remote work is now considered to be the new normal, especially for the ICT sector. Large corporations such as Facebook or Spotify have already announced the permanence of remote work arrangements with their employees (The Guardian, 2020; Forbes, 2020).

There has been high academic engagement with the issues that arise from the pandemic and many scholars have focused on the aspect of homeworking and its impact on household balance or the changing relationship between the home and the public space (Reuschke & Felstead, 2020; Byrne, 2020; Kaufmann et al. 2020; Manokha, 2020; Risi et al. 2021). During the pandemic remote work can be perceived as prestigious, since employees who worked from home were in a better position than workers who remained on-site and were exposed to health risks. However, remote work has been significantly criticised on the grounds of the normalisation of several negative parameters such as the fusion of personal space and work space, the alienation from coworkers, the imposed digital surveillance that many employers practiced and the general direction towards a 24/7 work pattern (Manokha, 2020).

In addition, Risa et al. (2021) highlight the unprecedented scarcity of spaces inside the house that the lockdown implemented and the renegotiation of the division of spaces that was needed in many households in order to provide for every family member’s needs. This renegotiation could not always be achieved without conflicts, while the coexistence of every single aspect of one’s life inside the home created additional tensions. Even for those living alone, the interruption of social life or any activity outside the house led to the need of reframing everyday life (Risa et al., 2012: S466) so as to make sense of the new reality. As a result, in the framework of the pandemic the liquidation of boundaries became increasingly intense and the digitisation of more and more aspects of life facilitated this process. Devine-Wright et al. (2020) discuss three theoretical dialectics around our relationship to place during the pandemic: (1) emplacement–displacement; (2) inside–outside; and (3) fixity–flow. These are not examined as exclusive to the pandemic but are considered to be central and significant for future research about the changing dynamics that the pandemic created between us and our perception of place, the notion of the home as well as the uneven implications on issues of displacement of more vulnerable populations.

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III. RESEARCH DESIGN 1. Research Aim and Research Questions Building upon the analysis above, the current study aims to further explore the new work practices as well as the new workplaces that emerge, within the specific context of the city of Athens. The study focuses on how digital freelancers organise and experience their labour geography. The term ‘digital freelancers’ is used to describe those who work as freelancers and may or may not be part of the gig economy, but they work ‘remotely’, without a specified permanent workplace that is located outside their own residence (excluding coworking spaces which are not considered to be permanent workspaces). The experiential dimension aims to include not only the spatialisation of work, but also the broader condition and the freelancers’ feelings about their work, their work-life balance, their time management or any other issue that may emerge through the research.

In order to cover the aforementioned aspects, the research questions are formed as follows: 1. What are the spaces of work of digital freelancers and how are they constructed within the field of Athens?

2. How do digital freelancers organise the micro-geographies of homework?

3.How do digital freelancers evaluate the spatio-temporal organisation of their work and what are the implications on other aspects of their daily life?

The first question aims to explore the ‘where’ and the ‘why’: how digital freelancers employ their agency and construct their everyday geographies given their working arrangement, as well as an insight on how the city of Athens functions as a field for these geographies. The second question focuses on the space of the home and the personalised strategies each respondent has adopted to cope with their working environment inside their personal space, while the third question aims to report in more detail the lived experience. The empirical chapters are structured following the thematic order of the research questions, since this is considered to be a ‘logic’ path to navigate through the research.

2. Methodology 2.1. Contribution The research aims to contribute to the academic dialogue concerning new work conditions and their spatialisation in a twofold manner. Firstly, through the choice of the city of Athens, the research aims to be part of the decentering of urban studies (Leontidou, 2014; Maloutas, 2018; Hadjimichalis, 2018). As many scholars highlight, the selective lens of research within the Anglo-American context and the assumption that they define the realities of other less examined cases is problematic and can lead to the omission of the complexities each case might present, or to less informed or unrealistic analogies. Thus the importance of studying additional and maybe more peripheral

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examples such as Athens should be a vital part of the way urban studies are perceived as a whole. In addition, the research focuses on the emergence of remote work as practiced before the emergence of the pandemic. The trajectory of working remotely before the pandemic can be reported, examining a group that did not merely compromise with this condition due to the global restrictions in the battle against COVID. The lived experience of these people is considered to be a significant input in the observation of the changes of the world of work. The combination of these two aspects upon which the research is constructed can be summarized in the words of Vaiou (2020:18): ‘Stories which connect global processes with concrete bodies enrich our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and inform the ‘big pictures’ – and not only the reverse.’

2.2. Methods and COVID limitations The research questions focus on the experience of individuals. Since remote work in Athens is still scattered and before COVID it was only at the beginning of its emergence, the imprint on the urban environment is not yet evident. Therefore the experience of remote workers is considered to be the most insightful data that can be collected. The research aims to record the realities of people who work remotely and explore the construction of their everyday geographies and for this purpose the method of interviewing is considered to be the most suitable. The initial research design also included the method of narrative mapping which, combined with interviewing, would enable the researcher to extract a set of stories of everyday life and the manner through which COVID restrictions altered them. However, due to the unpredictable situation that COVID imposed, the research design was constructed as a set of alternatives. Eventually the conditions in Athens did not allow the conduction of narrative mapping, since it requires a direct contact between the interviewer and the interviewee, as well as a level of comfort to be constructed. The research was therefore limited to interviewing, without reducing the quality of the data retrieved since the interview design adjusted to the ongoing conditions of the lockdown and aimed at the collection of all the necessary data. In addition, interviews help to provide insight into why people choose to act in certain ways (Pinkster, 2020). Especially in the issue under discussion where the structure of the new work conditions is becoming less and less spatially specified, interviewing can bring the active shaping of personal geographies in the front. Interviewing is therefore considered a valuable tool through which the research will give prominence to the professionals’ agency and the various ways through which they shape their daily realities within the urban field.

2.3. Sampling and fieldwork process The research design included a set of criteria that the participants should meet in order to fit the framework of the research. The quest for possible participants included contacting several groups on social media, since digital freelancers and especially digital nomads are very active in these platforms and use them for networking socially and professionally. I also reached out to my personal network, as well as to a number of coworking spaces located in Athens, requesting for the publication of my research topic throughout their network. Eventually, the latter pathway only led to one participant, while the rest of the participants were retrieved through the former ways of contact.

The balance criteria that were set prior to the actual fieldwork are listed below and have generally been met, however certain compromises have been made in lack of the ideal sample.

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-

-

-

Gender: 5 female, 4 male Age: It was already an accepted fact that the participants would be of young age, since the digital freelancer model is rather new in Greece. As a result, although the age range of the participants is 26-40, it is considered to be an indicative group of digital freelancers in Athens.

Housing arrangement: It is considered significant to take into account the housing arrangement of the participants, since it can severely affect the experience of working from home. The respondents were all currently living either alone or with their partner, so the research is considered to lack data concerning remote workers with parental identity or more complex housing arrangements. This criterion is rather crucial, since the existence of other cohabitants or the additional role of parenting can severely affect the experience of homeworking. Especially parenting is highly likely to mark a significant gender imbalance.

The lack of such participants therefore restricts the results of the research within a specified sample.

Country of employment: What appeared to be particularly significant in the lived experience of the participants was the country of their employment. Digital freelancers have the –overall privileged- option to work for companies that may be based abroad. This condition marks a striking income difference, thus affecting many aspects of their overall experience.

Four of the participants are employed for companies not based in Greece. It should be noted that this was not a predesigned parameter of the research, rather than an outcome of the sampling process.

Professional Sector: As expected after the theoretical section of the thesis, the dominant sectors in the digital freelance model are the creative and the ICT. Four of the participants are in the ICT sector, three in the creative sector and two of them are in the cultural sector.

Name*

Gender

Age

Housing arrangement

Country of employment

Sector

Ellie

Female

29

Alone

Greece

ICT

Rachel

Female

32

Couple

Greece

Creative

Greg

Male

31

Alone

Germany/Switzerland

ICT

Max

Male

35

Couple

England

ICT

Natalie

Female

36

Couple (& child)**

USA

Cultural

Paul

Male

26

Alone

Greece

Cultural

John

Male

33

Couple

Sweden

ICT

Chloe

Female

36

Alone

Greece

Creative

Mary

Female

40

Couple

Greece

Creative

*Names have been replaced with nicknames, for anonymity purposes. **The specific respondent is on maternity leave because she recently gave birth, so her answers refer to her working conditions prior to that. Therefore her current housing arrangement doesn’t respond to that of her narrations.

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The lockdown that was in effect during the fieldwork did not shape a favorable ground for the approach and the circumstances under which the interviews were eventually conducted were not ideal in some cases. Five of the interviews were conducted face-to-face with the use of facial masks and the necessary distance, either in the participant’s workspace or in an outdoor public space; three interviews were conducted through video calls and one over the phone. The levels of convenience varied and to a certain degree depended on the means of communication. The face-to-face interviews were significantly more convenient after a given point, and the discussion could flow with ease. The interviews that were conducted digitally did not have the same level of directness, while internet delays could occur and accidental interruptions could easily make the participants lose track of their thoughts. However, since all of the participants’ professions include the frequent use of digital means of communication, convenience was eventually achieved and all the interviews concluded in fruitful discussions.

All interviews were recorded and the transcripts were analysed through a framework approach method, as described by Bryman (2012; 579). The interview guide was structured thematically, following the research questions (see Appendix 1). The framework approach therefore resulted in the detection of themes and subthemes within the transcripts, organizing them beyond the limits of the posed questions and including any emerging motifs from the provided answers.

3. Positionality and Ethical Considerations The interviews were conducted in April and early May 2021, during the lockdown of Athens that was in effect since November 2020. The length of the lockdown had a severe impact on some of the respondents and due to the overly stressful feelings the discussion should be handled with discretion and understanding of the effects of home confinement, without diverging from the framework of the interview guide. Anonymity and confidentiality are preserved and the respondents were reassured about that before each interview.

In terms of positionality, the maintenance of a neutral attitude on my behalf has been a challenging issue since remote work has been a personal experience throughout the last ten months. This can also be perceived as a positive attribute, since it was easy for me to more deeply understand the difficulties of homeworking. However, since my personal experience was COVID-imposed and not a direct outcome of professional or academic choices, the maintenance of impartiality was crucial in order not to interpret the respondents’ stories through a more negative lens. Overall the fact that the researcher is close to the subject of the research is considered to be not only helpful for the process of the research, but also a preferable approach to urban studies; researching phenomena that are also a lived experience can help minimize the gap between the academic and the real world and eventually produce academic writings that more accurately reflect urban realities.

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4. Research context: the case of Athens The research is conducted in Athens, a city which is not another example of the spotlight mega-cities that are leading the changes in the examined field and as such it is much less analyzed through this lens. As it has already been stated, the secondary role of Athens should not make it a less important example; on the contrary, the examination of cases that differ from dominant cities and their analysis can help construct a more spherical and eventually accurate impression about the ongoing realities. Beyond that, Mediterranean cities like Athens might often be examined through a lens of what Leontidou (2014:108) describes as ‘an annoying ‘exception’ to Northern models.’ The understanding of such cities can therefore entail many gaps due to the fact that their particularities, and especially those that refrain from the dominant models, may be ignored. Thus, this chapter aims to briefly construct the image of the current socio-economic reality in Athens, placing the city within the zone of interaction of the ongoing transformations in the field of labour as they were described in the previous chapters.

4.1. Setting the scene Athens is nowadays a significant metropolis of Southern Europe, housing 4.000.000 residents -more than 35% of Greece’s entire population (Alexandri et al., 2017:21). However, as Maloutas (2018:25) points out, the significant influx of population that occurred throughout the 20th century did not come as a result of Athens’ economic power or attractiveness of its labour market. It was rather conjunctural and closely related to migration flows from the East (1920s) and the Balkans (late 1980s and 1990s) caused by post-war agreements or political changes outside the borders of Greece, combined with the high levels of poverty in the countryside and domestic migration. The establishment of Athens through consequent conjunctural factors was an obstacle for the city’s urban planning cohesion and economic organisation in the path of leading cities of Western Europe.

In the socio-economic sector, Athens can be perceived as an example of what some scholars have described as semi-peripheral capitalism (Hadjimichalis, 2018:15) meaning that the capitalist development path of Greece differs both from the industrialisation of Northern European cities and from underdeveloped models of former colonial examples. Indeed, the capitalist growth of Greece never reached the Fordist examples of Northern Europe and Maloutas (2018:26) describes how Athens’ growth relates with the lack of sufficient network of social services or large industrial units.

However, and with the significant contribution of low-cost labour force provided by the aforementioned migrant flows especially in the fields of manufacturing and service, Athens achieved a relative economic growth that reached to the extension of Athens-based companies in other Balkan regions (Alexandri et al., 2017) and the establishment of Athens as a significant urban center of the Eastern Mediterranean by the dawn of the 21st century.

However, since the crisis of 2008 Athens has been experiencing severe economic recession and the intensive austerity measures have shrunk the economic conditions of Athens’ residents downwards.

As Alexandri et al. (2017:23) describe: Unemployment soared, reaching 25.5% in 2012. The shrinkage of domestic demand, public investments and bank loans struck the economic sectors that had spearheaded the

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Athenian growth of the previous twenty years (real estate, media, telecommunications, cultural economy).

Within this context, the socio-political picture of Athens has been intense throughout the last decade since the multi-faceted crisis led to the deepening of socio-spatial inequalities, the impoverishment of the population as well as the significant rise of the far-Right. Consequent governments have adopted ‘salvation’ strategies (Vaiou, 2020) which have not yet managed to achieve economic recovery -indicatively, unemployment rates remain high, scoring 16,3% with an EU-27 average at 7,1% (Eurostat, 2021). There have been subsequent programmes of economic adjustment and austerity packages agreed between the Greek government, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank and the reforms that were implemented were structural in all domains of daily life, from the dismantling of social security to the threat towards housing and fundamental labour reforms.

4.2. Athens’ ‘ecosystem’ entering Greece 2.0 Parallel to the implementation of austerity packages and the general feeling of uncertainty that prevails during the last decade, a series of policies have been designed in order to lure investors into Greece. The state proceeded in extensive privatisations and tax facilitations for foreign investors as a means of enhancing national competitiveness (Alexandri et al., 2017). Throughout these years, the startup ‘ecosystem’ became one of the most active in the Southeast European region and Athens was even awarded the title of the European Capital of Innovation in 2018 (The Recursive, 2021). Companies of global range like Microsoft invested in Greece and numerous start-ups were bought off for significant amounts in the last years (TechCrunch, 2021). The dissemination of the start-up phenomenon has been criticised by many as a false salvation strategy due to the direct dependence on venture capitals, while policy-making revolving around the concept of start-up urbanism can be perceived through the lens of capitalism’s promise of happiness in a general context of economic shrinkage (Rossi, 2017:1000). The establishment of the start-up ‘ecosystem’ in Athens is what has initially introduced flexible working arrangements in the city’s reality, followed by the growing demand in remote positions especially focused on the ICT sector.

At the same time, the emergence of remote work and digital nomadism appeared as a profitable perspective since the attraction of digital nomads is built on a nexus of touristic destinations and tourism has always been the ‘heavy industry’ of Greece. In the spring of 2021, the government announced a new strategic plan for the growth of the country with special mention for steps towards the attraction of digital nomads in Greece, focusing both on islands and Athens as future nodes in a digital nomad network. The islands of Crete and Rhodes have already set up digital nomad communities which aim to grow in the footsteps of Madeira, where the first digital nomad village of Europe is hosted (Reuters, 2021). The growth plan, under the name ‘Greece 2.0’, includes a 50% income tax cut for seven years for professionals who move into the country while there is a plan for the creation of a special digital nomad visa (Schengen Visa Info News, 2021). Despite these policy ambitions, the existing infrastructure is deeply problematic and cannot correspond to the needs of this group; according to Reuters (2021), many are staying for weeks instead of months due to difficulties, such as slow WiFi. Indeed, as it appears in the popular digital nomad websites, Athens remains low on the ranking of cities (Nomadlist, 2021; Homelike, 2021). Therefore it is an aspiration 23

of the research to report the feedback of digital freelancers on the city’s suitability for remote work, associating policy goals with the lived experience.

There are no official data reports on the exact growth of remote work in Athens. However the number of coworking spaces in large European cities can be used as a metric, not in order to accurately depict the remote work field of Athens but more towards the purpose to create analogies that can help us place Athens in its corresponding ‘rank’ among the leading cities. Gathering data from ‘coworking.com’, which appears to be the leading website for the quest of coworking spaces in Europe, the following map depicts the analogies between large European countries, with Athens listing 31 coworking spaces (CWS). Indicatively London, which holds the first position in the number of coworking spaces, hosts 330 CWS.

Figure 3: Coworking Spaces in European cities. Max: London, 330 CWS, Min: Tallinn, 11.

Data source: www.coworking.com

4.3. A few notes on the lockdown Since the interviews were conducted during the lockdown period and the discussion about the respondents’ experiences also includes this timeframe, it is considered important to briefly explain the conditions and special regulations of the lockdown in Athens. Starting on November 7th, the government announced that all residents of Athens were obliged to stay inside their house and were only allowed to go out from 5am to 9pm after sending an sms requesting permission and for one of the following:

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-

Medical or health-related purpose, demonstrating document from a doctor or going to the pharmacy Work related purpose, demonstrating an official document provided by the employer or a document provided by the tax platform for freelancers, mentioning the hours and areas within which they had to move for work purposes Visit to a public service or the bank, demonstrating document of appointment Visit to a person requiring assistance Attending a ceremony (i.e. funeral, wedding) Physical exercise or dog walk, within a specific perimeter from the place of residence

These regulations were often altered and became stricter or looser at times (i.e. at some point during the weekends the curfew started from 6pm instead of 9pm) but the overall guidelines remained the same, including the use of facial masks in any indoor and outdoor space. The fine for breaking any of the aforementioned regulations or not providing the corresponding document was 300 euros, an amount which is considered to be significantly high, both related to the minimum wage of Greece and to other European countries. According to ‘Covid Tracker’, a tool provided by Oxford University measuring the relationship between the number of COVID cases and the governmental responses, during the six-month lockdown of November 2020 to April 2021 Greece kept a stringency score of 70-80 (from a scale of 10 to 90), the highest among all other European countries within the same timeframe.

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IV. PRE-COVID GEOGRAPHIES OF REMOTE WORK 1. Working arrangements The discussion of the results and their analysis starts from the pre-COVID geographies of remote work as they were narrated through the interviews. The realities of each respondent are different but the variation of their testaments and the reasoning behind them gradually construct the picture of the shared experience among them. The shaping of the interviewees’ labor geographies is heavily dependent on their specific working arrangement. This varied from exclusively remote with no physical workspace provided by the employer, to exclusively remote with the option of going to a coworking space reserved on behalf of their employer or to a hybrid mode, where they would go to the office one or two days per week. Even in the latter case, the arrangement was flexible and could be transformed into an entirely remote condition upon the employee’s choice.

As will become clear in the following chapter, the cornerstone or remote work appears to be the space of the house; this is the most central shared experience despite the variations that appeared throughout the interviews. However, all of the respondents have tried or eventually adopted the habit of having a supplementary workspace, which may be specified (i.e. a coworking space) or may change constantly (i.e. various cafes). This chapter will initiate from the exploration of the various geographies that unfolded through the interviews and the variations among the frequency one uses a supplementary working environment and on what criteria they do so.

A very significant parameter that appeared during the fieldwork process was the country of employment of each respondent. Half of the respondents are employed by companies with no physical presence in Athens, therefore they are living in Athens while officially working abroad. This condition is crucial for the management of one’s labor geography since the absolute absence of a spatial point of reference is a given fact. The notion of the office is non-existent, rather than secondary as might be the case for hybrid working arrangements or even remote workers who might go to their office once a month for a group meeting, as one of the respondents described. Another striking difference regarding the country of employment is the income level, since all of the respondents working for non-domestic companies are employed by firms located in Northern European countries or the United States, therefore the wage gap is significant. Given the fact that the minimum wage in Greece is nearly half the minimum wage of Northern European countries (Eurostat, 2021), it can be stated that their perception of remote work is built upon a different base than that of the respondents working for domestic companies.

2. Navigating remote work routines in Athens The experience of the interviewees revealed three different types of spaces of work beyond that of the house: the coworking spaces, the cafes and other houses. The space of the office is not taken into account throughout this section, since it is part of an imposed workspace rather than the outcome of the freelancers’ agency.

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2.1. Coworking spaces Most of the respondents did not seem to have great interest in coworking spaces, while some were familiar with their existence but were not willing to attempt working from there. The idea of working next to people who are not colleagues while also having to pay for the provided space seemed unattractive. For example Mary, who works as an illustrator for many years and has worked in a studio with other professionals of the field in the past, mentioned how she rejected the option of the coworking space because she would prefer to know the people she would ‘move in’ with in a workspace. The financial issue appeared as an obstacle for many of the respondents who mentioned how the prices were unaffordable and did not correspond to their monthly income.

When it comes to the respondents who did use coworking spaces, they mentioned different reasons for this choice, based on the nature of each coworking space. For Rachel, who is also an illustrator, the coworking space was a trial alternative which she eventually evaluated in a very positive way.

She has chosen a hub which is within walking distance from her home and is located in the center of Athens. The space provides a shared office with other professionals and a locker for her items, while she has brought her own screen. This structure enables her to not necessarily carry all her office material back home when she leaves the coworking space. Apart from that, Rachel referred to the advantage of socializing and networking, which is valuable for her on a personal and a professional level: ‘Everyone here is really social and open, usually those who work in a coworking space do not have an issue with socializing. […] It may not be to the point where I was with my colleagues in the office, but […] we almost made a project together with a guy from here. I believe we will actually end up doing projects together’. Rachel, 32 Natalie recounted a different experience from her coworking space, which falls into the category of what was described in the theoretical chapter as ‘market-led’ coworking spaces. In her case, the office is not a shared space but rather a private room within a business center for which she has a key and exclusive access. The coworking space was a functionable solution for her, since she lives in a rather small apartment with her partner and she needed adequate office space to store her documents and quiet conditions for the frequent phone calls her job involves. Thus the coworking space creates for her an arrangement that functions well; in her own words, ‘it’s not like a space that promotes the exchange of ideas among companies, it’s not community-centered like other hubs in Athens. It's mostly a practical solution rather than a coworking space that is useful for networking. There are facilities, photocopy machines, etc.’

However, she commented on the lack of socialisation with other members of the coworking space, since this arrangement resembles more a set of private office spaces than a shared coworking space. She also highlighted the importance of leaving her work laptop behind when returning home as a reason for her to be more productive when she is at the office space and not overwork, as she used to when she was working from home.

2.2. Cafes and other spaces The alternative of a cafe was very common among the respondents, all of whom mentioned having worked from cafes. The frequency varied, from once a month in order to briefly change the working

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environment to a daily habit. Most of the respondents chose an in-between arrangement, working from cafes once or twice a week in order to better organise their time and take a break from homeworking, or even create a sentiment of surveillance: ‘The structure of an office usually has a form of surveillance, forcing you to do what you have to do. In order to do that on your own, you have to discipline yourself and going to a café might be a way to do that.’ John, 33 However, beyond using it as a form of self-restriction, the choice of the exact cafes one might work from shapes their personalised geography of work. By choosing among the available cafes -that may or may not be appropriate for work- one may rediscover their relationship with the city, since the exploration for new places that can host one’s workspace can be intriguing. This was the case for Paul, who has created a personalised map of his everyday navigation within the city, as a result of his difficulty in setting boundaries between his personal space and his workspace: ‘Before COVID, I would work very often from cafes. I essentially knew all the possible alternatives for cafes in the center where you can work from. And that was mostly because I couldn’t deal with being at home. […]Athens is a very nice city […] this kind of ‘chaos’ creates very beautiful spots that are very nice for this kind of job. And these are the places I try to explore, I wouldn’t go and work from Starbucks, I try to find smaller and more local places, mostly in the center. It’s a very nice city, I always try to explore new places to go and work from, I have them pinned in my google maps.’ Paul, 26

Figure 4: Paul’s cafe work experience. The heart symbols are his favorite cafes to work from.

Working from cafes was described as a pleasant solution for a time slot of two or three hours within the day by many respondents, who found the fuzz of a cafe to be rather a ‘creative noise’ in their ears while they also described the special connection they have created with specific cafes. Mary referred to having three or four different cafes from where she used to work before COVID, while she also had a specific table in each one of them; her workspace was described as the combination of her desk at home and every one of these coffee tables together.

Ellie also had a frequent habit of going to cafes near her home in order to better concentrate and feel less lonely, as she felt when working alone from home. In order to deal with this sentiment, Ellie also used to work in one of her colleagues’ houses. She narrated how this was a very effective way to battle the laziness she would feel in her home, while she was able to recreate the feeling of camaraderie she missed from not working in a ‘conventional’ office, as she used to in the past.

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2.3. The changing relation with the city One issue that emerged during the interviews was how remote work has affected the respondents’ relation with their city. The making of their geographies is different without the stable point of reference of a ‘conventional’ work, and since most of the respondents have past experience of such a workspace they explained how the shift into remote work has changed how they experience the city on a daily basis. In the aforementioned example of Paul, the remote condition can create a closer bond with the city since it entails the exploration of new places. However in other cases remote work may function the opposite way and eventually deprive the person of a complexity that the routine of commuting to work could give. Max describes the habits he had developed during the time he worked in an office that was located in a neighborhood further away from his home: ‘I used to work in a ‘conventional’ job in Vyronas. I would wake up, ride my motorbike, go there [...] I had relations with the local café and the bakery, we would hang out and have a chat. Then a colleague lived nearby, we would hang out at his place after work… I could discover parts of the city, get familiar with elements of the neighborhood I didn’t know about, find new routes to reach my destination or even find bread with beet which a local bakery made and I liked it a lot. I used to buy that when I worked there. [...] These dynamics, these mandatory commutes make you more socially active.’

Max commented on the power of one’s agency in maintaining and re-shaping their relation with the city. This was also the case for Natalie, who elaborated on maintaining her habits of moving around the city and did not perceive her place of work as a defining factor for her to grow relations with places in Athens. Despite that, she concluded: ‘Especially during the winter, working from home can alienate me from the outside, because I tend to stretch the working hours and there is a general sentiment of sedimentation. […] If I worked in another area of Athens, and I liked it there, I would be able to connect differently with a new neighborhood.’

Another aspect that emerged was the evaluation of the city of Athens as the specified field of their everyday geographies. All respondents commented in various manners about the city of Athens and for many it was not considered to be remote-friendly. Rachel, comparing Athens with Porto and Lisbon where she has lived in the past, commented on the disproportionate prices of Athens especially regarding the daily cost of working from cafes. Within this frame, it was also commented how the city promotes a plan for digital nomad attraction that does not reflect its actual reality, emphasizing on the lack of quality internet connection as well as general lack of concern on behalf of the municipality: ‘I think that Athens gives nothing of what they claim nowadays, that Athens is friendly for digital nomads and so on. [...] you don’t have a city, a municipality that says ‘yes, we will have 100mbps internet in every park and install benches – simple things. You don’t have a municipality that says ‘we are going to do something about the rising rents’, or improve the quality of public transportation so that people don’t need to use their cars as much. Athens has none of the safety nets other countries have to offer. Working remotely is possible, but it depends on the terms upon which you work and ultimately Athens is deeply problematic.’

Max, 36

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3. Micro-geographies of homework: the desk as a battlefield As mentioned above, all the interviewees shared the experience of homeworking. The respondents described how even before COVID the merging of the workspace into one’s home was a challenge in various ways and for different reasons.

3.1. Housing structure A first defining factor for the experience of homework is the structure of the house itself. For many respondents, it would be preferable to live in a house large enough to offer the possibility of transforming a separate room into an office space. John found himself to be in the ideal position in this respect. He lives with his partner who also works from home, so they turned an extra room into their home office from where they both work. Max, who works for a London-based company, mentioned how he considers himself to be lucky enough to gain a high income and afford a large house that has an extra room he can use as an office. Greg did not share the same perception and despite his significantly high income for Greek standards -since he is employed from a company in Switzerland- he enjoyed his housing arrangement where everything coexisted within 25 sq.m. It should be noted however that Greg is living alone and he also elaborated on his perception of his job being more like a hobby to him due to the fact that he enjoys doing it; he emphasized on how he prefers every aspect of his life within the same space.

Another aspect that appears to be important when it comes to the conditions of homeworking is the office amenities that home can provide. The preexisting furniture of the house need to serve a double purpose, therefore a dining room or even a couch can transform into a workspace throughout the day, while factors such as internet connection might define the choices of spatialising work at home. For Ellie, the workspace was spread around the rooms of the house: the comfortable table of the living room was replaced by the uncomfortable yet well connected kitchen corner when it came to important meetings or video calls.

3.2. Distractions and disturbances The respondents discussed how working from home can be challenging due to the distractions that may exist within the same space or the needs of other people living in the house which can create a conflictual atmosphere. The respondents were divided among those living alone and those living with their partner and the experiences differed. For those living with a partner, for example, it made a notable difference whether their partner was also working from home -like in the case of John that was mentioned above, where they both worked from their home office. For those whose partners did not work from home, their presence within the workspace of the home could be distractive or even disturbing. However the most challenging experience was described by respondents who had lived in shared apartments in the past. Ellie was working from a corner of her living room but eventually placed her desk inside her bedroom, due to the fact that her roommates would want to watch TV or rest in the same room she would work, which was disturbing for her.

Mary, on the other hand, did not retreat as easily and described how her workspace in the living room ultimately could not be used by her roommate for any other purposes:

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‘...eventually this desk was a battlefield, because I wouldn’t let her touch anything on it, although it was in the shared living room. She would leave her coat on my desk and I would tell her no, don’t touch anything that is on the desk. But well, she would say, it’s in the living room, but at the same time for me it wasn’t merely the living room.’ Mary, 40 Many of the respondents also commented on the ubiquitous distractions of the home that are not necessarily related to another person’s activity. The fact that one might work from the same room where they sweep, iron or cook can be particularly disturbing. Mary discussed how during the first years of homeworking she could be disciplined but after some time, ‘even the couch was a distraction, everything was a distraction’. For many, homeworking may rapidly lead to constant interruptions for house chores, leading to the increasing lack of concentration. This feeling works both ways, since it was also mentioned how the existence of work at home is a stressful factor for non-working hours and the sight of work-related items or furniture is making it difficult for them to rest inside their own house: ‘I work at my dining table, which I then look at night when I rest and watch TV and I get a weird feeling. I told my partner, ‘if I knew I would turn the dining table into my office desk I would never have bought it in the first place’.

3.3. Perception of time One of the most commonly mentioned issues of homeworking appeared to be that of overworking and the difficulty to implement temporal limits within the workday. One factor that can cause overworking is the freelance status per se, since a fixed work schedule is not very common and combined with the fact that the monthly income may be calculated by the hour, more hours of work on a regular basis equals a higher income. It is noteworthy that only one of the respondents, who has great interest towards workers’ rights, declared to be strict about his working hours and never work more than agreed in his contract. For all the rest, overworking was part of their reality which they had either accepted or were struggling to limit.

It is remarkable how difficult it appears to be for most of the respondents to manage their time schedule. Ellie described what Tietze & Musson (2005) refer to as ‘the ontological limbo’ (see Chapter II, par. 2.1.): she found herself confused and often trapped in an in-between position where at the same time she was and she was not at work. This feeling was also mentioned by other respondents and appeared to create a severe problem in the individual’s feeling of self-control and well-being, since it created a lot of stress while reducing productivity. Ellie described how she often felt like she did not know how much work she had done at the end of the day, and the fact that she found herself being neither relaxed nor productive made her feel that she was experiencing what she described as a ‘soul-sucking’ condition.

Another issue that emerged is that working from home caused some of the respondents to take larger breaks during their workday, therefore replacing the time lost afterwards. This might also apply in reverse, since some of the respondents highlighted the augmented expectations posed on them due to their remote status. Overworking can occur on a regular basis due to a generalised perception that homeworking causes less fatigue. As Max describes:

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‘...it is considered a fact that remote work is simpler so you will work more, [...] and as a result you can answer an email at 9 p.m. Or if you work on a project, the most vulnerable or most cynic of the team may lead the rest of the team downwards – if one replies to an email on a Saturday, then there is a precedent that has been set.‘ Max, 36

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V. RECONFIGURING THE GEOGRAPHY OF WORK UNDER COVID Having built on the aforementioned, the following part will analyze how the geographies described were affected by the COVID restrictions. Due to the restrictions home confinement was in some cases extremely intense and inevitably became the center of the discussion.

‘This condition has created a feeling where ‘I don’t have the right to…’. We don’t have the right to go somewhere, do something, I don’t know. I feel like my parents have punished me and I have to stay in my room. ‘ Chloe, 35 During the six-month lockdown of Athens, all cafes remained closed; it was therefore inevitable that those who used to work from cafes on a regular basis lost what they partially perceived as their workspace. However since this was a generalised restriction, it could be assumed that those who already partly worked from home would have less difficulty in adjusting to the situation, having already invented ways to embrace homeworking. Albeit such a comparison cannot be made, the interviews revealed that despite their past experience, for some home restriction was devastating.

Chloe was the respondent who appeared to be most deeply affected by the lockdown: ‘During March I had a serious freak out. Everything I did, I did it alone. All the time. Or constantly in front of my computer, in meetings. It takes a lot of energy, being on Zoom all the time. And I used to do that before this condition too, this is why it is weird to explain that now. But then it wasn’t only that [...] Now I feel burned out. It was the bottom for me.

Negative thoughts, about myself, my job… It was very weird.‘ Chloe, 35 For Chloe, the feeling of home confinement was very intense even though she did not work from cafes more than once a week. The limitation of staying inside the house created a feeling of imprisonment or punishment, as she described, because she was aware of the fact that there was not an option to work from another place even if she wanted to. The lockdown was very restrictive for other respondents as well, especially those who had grown habits of working around people, such as Ellie who worked in colleagues’ houses or Paul who worked from various cafes. Respondents falling into that category described feelings of isolation and intense loneliness, while they referred to losing their interest towards work, since working became much less pleasant than it used to be for them.

1. Working remotely under the same roof COVID restrictions led people who were previously not working from home to do so, and this is a condition that created tension for the respondents who lived with their partners. Rachel described how she faced difficulty by living with her partner who is a personal trainer and had to use the living room throughout the day for his digital workout sessions. As a result Rachel was forced to alternate her working environment and go for the first time in a coworking space since the cafes were no longer an available option. Similarly, other respondents discussed how there was an indirect impact on their work due to their cohabitants’ new working condition which should also be hosted within the same home. In the example of Mary, the inability to escape in a cafe was combined with her partner’s home confinement and forced telework due to COVID regulations. She found herself limited in a smaller working space because her partner also needed to use the house for his work.

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Beyond the spatial restriction this implemented, for Mary it could be impossible to focus while her partner had to attend multiple video calls during the day and mentioned how they eventually sometimes changed houses, working from friends or other places in order to avoid annoying each other.

‘The most significant change with COVID for me is not related to my job, but to my partner’s since we are living together. The major change is that, and also the fact that you have nowhere to go after work. This is really important. Before, you would finish working and go out for a walk. Now you would finish but you couldn’t go out. So this was the worst part, not being inside the house but being unable to do something else afterwards.’ Mary, 40

2. The dissolution of time Besides the dissolution of spatial boundaries, time also gained an entirely new meaning during the lockdown -or, more accurately, lost the meaning it used to have. The absence of preexisting activities during the day made the separation of work time and non-work time increasingly difficult and disturbed already gained balances. Many respondents referred to having noticed how they tend to work extra hours simply because there was nothing else to do: ‘There is a larger stretching of time, because you don’t really have much to do after work, and no one has. Also sometimes your superiors will tell you to do something extra because well, it’s not like you have other obligations. I think there is a tendency, I see it in my friends too, to work more, it is a much more liquid condition.’ Ellie, 29 Such was the case for Chloe as well, who mentioned how she has started to work during the weekends, which is something she would not do in the past. The absence of another activity or generally of social life made people devote more time on their work merely because it was an activity per se and it could be prefered over spending time alone inside the house. The phenomenon of overworking was noticed by many of the respondents and they all attributed it to the loss of other daily activities or the digitisation of them. When everything is conducted from the same screen, it is easy to switch among the various tasks and eventually spend the entire day in front of the screen, as Rachel narrated to be the case with her dance lessons. Since even this activity turned online, after the lesson she would get back to her laptop for some additional work. Within the same context, some respondents discussed how they had noticed to neglect daily habits they used to preserve, due to a generalized liquidisation of the notion of time: ‘Another thing that feels weird for me is that while I am generally very structured, I would get up, make my coffee, have breakfast, get down to work etc, and despite doing all these without a problem before the lockdown, now I even had a difficulty in stopping for lunch [...] although I didn’t have a specific deadline over my head or any direct pressure. […] I didn’t respect myself enough to follow these habits. Sometimes the day would go by and I didn’t have the time to go for a walk. Is that even possible? Of course I had the time. It was confinement.’ Chloe, 35

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VI. BOUNDARY SETTING STRATEGIES Having explored the various geographies that were described by the respondents and the impact of the lockdown on them, this section will aim to focus on the various strategies the respondents described to have invented both before and during COVID in order to separate their work spatially, temporally or even digitally and materially. The most intense field of conflict was the space of home and most strategies were applied in the frame of homeworking.

1. Spatial boundaries For the majority of the respondents, the need for spatial restriction within the home was intense and that led to the implementation of a series of strategies. Many of the respondents were insistent on not working from their bedroom, especially those who had gone through a period of doing so.

Ellie mentioned how she did not want to relax, sleep and work within the same room and how she needed to separate the uses of her daily life; Rachel would very often work even from her bed for a few hours, since the small desk she had inside her bedroom was practically an extension of her bed.

It is due to this condition that she eventually decided to move into a bigger house, realising that since she turned to freelancing, homeworking would be a daily need that demanded a more spacious apartment where the rest area would be separate form the work area. Paul and Chloe were directly against working inside the bedroom: ‘For me it is very crucial that even within the house the space where you sleep should be separated from the space from where you work. [...] Now I live alone, I have my desk in my living room and my room is strictly for sleeping.’ Paul, 26 ‘I have a huge resistance and repulsion towards working within the room where I rest. This is something extremely bad for me.’ Chloe, 35 The transformation of a specific space inside the house into a workspace was also very commonly discussed and it appears that homeworkers need to create an atmosphere of work at home. Ellie describes how she has switched many spaces of work within her home, putting her desk facing a window or her bookcase; she noted how it helped her feel more ‘at work’ when she put decorative plants on her desk and restricted her view from the rest of the house, in order to feel that she is ‘entering the zone of work’. For many the ideal is -or would be- to have a separate room that can function as an office and personalise the space accordingly.

The construction of a workspace is an important investment. Ellie and Rachel have bought large screens so they can more comfortably work from their home and not use their laptop and they both mentioned how this was a practical expense as well as a milestone in the process of embracing work at home. Max highlighted how acquiring the necessary equipment is often a severe added expense, which he did not take into account before turning to freelancing: ‘I consider this to be the employer’s job,[...] I would go there and find a pc, two screens, all the software needed already installed, coffee, break, gossip… [...] My effort to ‘represent’ the facilities of an office in my house –buy a screen, rearrange and redefine a new space, having the luxury of living in a big apartment and having a small space that can turn into a

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separate office without disturbing my roommate… There is a series of facilities that are not strictly considered as work-related expenses but are in fact exactly that. This was an investment of time and money that was necessary.’ Max, 36 Even in the case of interviewees who were not very strict about the spatial restriction of work, it was noted how the construction of a workspace was important for them. Greg had organised a specific corner within his small studio that was dedicated to his work, having bought the correspondent equipment. Despite the fact that he did not show any intention of separating the resting area form the working area, it was in the latter that he had dedicated some effort in order to make it his ideal workspace.

The ultimate strategy for spatial boundary setting was to eventually leave the house and this has been a motive for the construction of each personalised worklife geography, as they were presented above.

‘Generally, everyone feels comfortable with this condition [working from home]. But after some time you are getting tired. There are others who don’t feel like that, but I eventually felt the need to get out of my house. And this led up to working in a studio for some time.’Mary, 40 It is the same need that led Rachel to try the coworking space of Ellie to work from colleagues’ houses. Chloe also mentioned how freelancing can become lonely and getting the work out of the house a couple of days per week helped her to better construct her weekly schedule. In that sense, leaving the house can also be perceived as a time management strategy, which leads to the exploration of the various temporal boundaries the respondents described to have set.

Throughout the lockdown, the option of leaving the house was no longer existent. As a result, many of the respondents who used this as a boundary setting strategy discussed how they felt like they lost an already conquered balance in their daily life and eventually needed to reinvent it.

2. Temporal boundaries and ritual preservation ‘When I realized I was working the entire day, I tried to schedule other things. I started ballet lessons, so that I know that some days of the week I will have to leave the house in order to cut the working hours. But I had to force myself into that and make me leave the house.‘ Natalie, 36 Natalie’s narration illustrates how the strategy of leaving the house can function on both a spatial and a temporal level. Time-restriction strategies were brought up by many of the respondents who made efforts to help themselves increase their productivity and remain within the specified working hours. The main issues regarding time were on one hand overworking and on the other hand the difficulty to have an overview of how work tasks proceeded. In order to battle these obstacles, Rachel used a task manager application that enabled her to dedicate specific time slots for specific tasks. Ellie had to adopt more specific strategies, since she found herself stretching too much her working hours. She started writing reports for her manager -without that being demanded- and

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eventually she sometimes writes reports to herself and invents deadlines, so that she is aware of what needs to be done within a specified period of time. Max also referred in a more abstract way to the implementation of temporal boundaries, by not engaging with any work issues after a given time.

Another helpful strategy in restricting the working hours within the desired time was the preservation of some daily habits that would help construct an immaterial notion of workspace. The most common strategy was to wake up earlier and prepare breakfast, instead of drinking coffee while already having started work. Many also referred to the importance of getting dressed, as if they had to get out of the house, and ‘represent a normal working situation’. Paradoxically, while it could be a previous habit to work in pyjamas and later during the day get dressed and go to a cafe for a few hours, at this point new habits should be adopted in order to represent the ‘normal’ or, as Natalie mentions, ‘be aware that you are in another condition’. As a result, a habit that did not exist within the same context prior to the lockdown transformed into a daily ritual that needed to be preserved.

‘I would wake up, make my coffee, change my clothes and not work in my pyjamas, you know I was trying to find ways to set boundaries in this condition, placing myself in a different state during work. Because initially, I would wake up at 8:50, start working while still in my pyjamas, and make coffee after I have already started working… It was all a mix, it would all sink in within the flow of the day.’ Natalie, 36

3. Digital boundaries Many respondents referred to their need to place digital boundaries to their work. This was not only discussed as a reaction to the generalised digitisation of daily life throughout the lockdown but also as a difficulty that had already appeared in their daily routine and led some to spend their entire day in front of their computer. Paul decided to turn off his work notifications from his mobile phone in order to avoid working more due to an email that could come to his inbox after his working hours.

Other respondents highlighted the importance of having a separate work laptop in order to be able to switch it off and not return to work issues after navigating digitally for personal purposes: ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have the economic luxury of buying another desktop or laptop, in order to separate my work and personal computer. This would be the most normal. A friend of mine who lives in Germany has a separate work laptop, so when he shuts it down his work is over. These rituals have a meaning. When the work laptop is shut down, you will not check out something on youtube or whatever personal you want to do in the same laptop, there will be a separate materiality. In my case, since I only have one device, things are a bit blurry.’ Ellie, 29

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VII. BEYOND WORKSPACE Within the framework of recording an overall evaluation of remote work as it was expressed by the interviewees, a number of issues emerged. In this last chapter of the analysis the issues that refer to aspects beyond that of the workspace will be discussed, in an effort to better construct the consequences of remote work in the respondents’ lives.

1. The future of work and the flexibility of the remote model It was an unquestionable fact for all of the respondents that remote work is the future of work.

Especially those employed in the ICT sector highlighted the rise of remote work and how work arrangements based on freelancing and teleworking are about to become the new standard even in the market of Athens. This was expressed in various manners, by some respondents with a positive attitude that predicted access to the international market and significantly higher income levels.

Greg talked about how easy it has been for him to find a job in this sector, while living in Greece which still holds high unemployment rates. He mentioned that he might receive job offers in LinkedIn twice a week from companies abroad, therefore he considers this period to be extremely fertile for the ICT sector.

For others, the lack of benefits, insurance or standardised holidays was a severe drawback of the new working reality. Especially for those who do not grow a freelance business but rather work in positions that used to be in an employer-employee model, the responsibilities that the individual needs to cover and are related to income regulations, pension packages and accounting management create an extremely stressful condition. At the same time, it was clear from all respondents that freelancing makes overworking nearly inevitable. John admitted to working twelve hours per day on average, and although he knew this was not ‘appropriate’ as a working condition he insisted on doing so. Those who resist in stretching their schedule talked about their network and how popular this is getting, to the point where this condition was described as ‘the dissolution of the notion of daily life’. As Max pointed out, ‘there is a liquidation of boundaries, and in these cases the powerful wins. So this is not a liquidisation towards relaxation, but towards a constant status of work.’

In spite of the aforementioned, in all cases it was stated that the flexibility and the non-existence of a superior create a feeling of freedom that everyone emphasized on and would not change, especially when they have had past experience with employers. This conflicting condition is illustrated in Chloe’s words: ‘The change from being an employee within a structured place with rules and so on, to a total void where I have to manage everything on my own, putting pressure on myself, looking on my own for help or for associates. [...] This is part of the nature of a freelance job. But I would still choose freelancing, because I think that in the entireness of this experience there are some elements that help me become a better person professionally and personally. You learn different things as an employee, when they give you carrots, you eat each carrot and you go upwards and upwards. This is one experience. It is entirely different from the freelancing experience. [...] (freelancing) is another reality, I learn new

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things about myself. It is a very interesting experience, a love-hate challenge with myself. ’ Chloe, 35 For some, this condition also enables the possibility of relocation due to their ‘work from anywhere’ status. Max mentioned how, when working remotely, ‘you always have relocation in mind’ while John said how he has thought of trying to live on an island or somewhere generally more peaceful than Athens. Rachel described how she could work from anywhere, especially before COVID when she felt less pressure within her daily routine. For a short period of time during the summer she sometimes worked by the beach, as she said, matching the words of Greg that were in a parallel narration: ‘I wanted to be able to work from wherever I like. If I want, I can go up a mountain and work from there. [...] I have gone on a mountain trip once and worked from there.’ Greg, 31

2. Social life and socialisation through work Remote work and the associated geographies of labour also had implications for the respondents’ social lives. The issue of socialisation and networking is one that was mentioned in several discussions and appears to be a problematic aspect of remote work especially those who have worked in ‘conventional’ workspaces in the past and have the experience of working with others.

The absence of a physical workplace was commented negatively, with an emphasis by those working for companies abroad who were deprived of even the possibility of common talk with colleagues.

These respondents did not have the chance to recreate the camaraderie of a workspace, as Ellie did by working in colleagues’ houses or as Rachel tried by creating a new network from her coworking space. Even in this case, Rachel clarified how different this network was compared to the relations she had grown with her colleagues in the office she used to work: ‘I miss this daily interaction, where you see the other person for too many hours and then you get used to them and you make jokes with each other, it’s like you are becoming siblings. I miss that, it is one of the things I would like to have. But yet again, I wouldn’t want to work full time for 8 hours somewhere on a daily basis.’ Rachel, 32 Remote work is changing the very core of social relations through the network of work, since the lack of physical proximity is making the shaping of relations a lot harder. For some this is not such a central issue while for others it is considered to be catastrophic for the broader picture of human relations. This is significantly determined by each person’s character, since those who expressed indifference on the issue admitted to generally having a difficulty in socializing, so working alone was not a problem for them. Others, however, expressed feelings of loneliness. Chloe referred to a sentiment of ‘professional loneliness’ while Natalie described how the minor encounters or small talks of an office construct a much more human and friendly environment to get through the workday while she emphasized on the difficulty of making every decision, from a minor to a more important one, without having a second opinion or someone to talk to in a more casual manner than that of a video call.

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VIII. CONCLUSIONS The aim of this research was to explore the geographies of work of digital freelancers within the field of Athens, as well as to study the experiential dimension of these geographies and their interconnectedness with other aspects of daily life. The examination of the field of Athens through the lens of its position in the digital economy was combined with the data provided by the interviews, introducing us to worklife daily trajectories that may be disconnected from an employer-specified location, but appear to be strongly connected to other locations with often hybrid uses.

The data provided by the interviews can now be mirrored to the exploration of the various tensions that arise within the field of Athens from its reality throughout recession to the growth plans through a policy-wise lens. The correlation of official strategic plans with the actual lived experience of individuals within the urban reality can give way to a more realistic approach about the needs of the people who practice digital freelance professions, resulting in fruitful insights and reflections upon the upcoming plans. At this point it should be highlighted, as is often noted by scholars within the field of urban studies, that there appears to be a problematic of lost connection between policy-making and the individuals or social groups for whom policies are designed. In the following, the previous analysis is used to answer the different research questions.

R.Q.1: What are their spaces of work and how are they constructed within the field of Athens?

The remote workspace is constructed as a puzzle of various places that altogether shape the freelancer’s geography. They combine home, cafes or other third spaces and, for some, coworking spaces. This nexus that defined their workspace was tottered by COVID restrictions. Scheme 1 aims to demonstrate the specific spaces of work that define the geographies. They are divided between the space of the home and supplementary working environments, whose structure is either work-oriented (office, coworking spaces) or not. The non-work oriented spaces are chosen through more agency-driven processes and may be multiple places (for example, many different cafes).

Scheme 1: Spaces of work pre-COVID

During the lockdown, the alternative workspaces located outside of the home were restricted, with the sole exception of some coworking spaces, which overall were not preferred by most of the

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respondents. It was also mentioned that an ultimate solution could be to work from another home, although officially this was not an allowed option.

The relation between the pre-COVID and the COVID geographies of remote work appeared to be intense. For many of the respondents the impact of COVID was severe, since it eliminated the alternatives to homeworking and was perceived as an imposed constraining factor weighing upon everyday life. For the interpretation of COVID worklife geographies the emplacement-displacement dialectic is a useful way of understanding, since all respondents experienced the coexistence of both powers into their lives. As Devine-Wright et al. (2020:2) explain in their paper about the reconsideration of our relationship with place within the framework of the pandemic, ‘emplacement is not just about being pinned to place. It is an awareness of the tensions and nuances within these relationships, and their impact on our ontological security’, while ‘displacement [...] reflects myriad forms of alienation from the everyday places that have meaning and meet our material and psychological needs’. The feelings described by the respondents reflect on emplacement and the threat of one’s ontological security, since some respondents described how they felt like they had been punished, about intense sentiments of isolation from the outside or from their social relations.

Scheme 2: Spaces of work during COVID

Beyond these feelings, which are likely to be common for many people who experienced the lockdown, the distinction that can be made for the interviewees is through their identity as digital freelancers. For most of the respondents, the geography of remote work already revolved mainly around the space of the home, but even the few times of working outside of the home were providing the desired balance. The emplacement-displacement bipole applies in this case since this balance was disrupted. With the exclusion of alternative or supplementary workspaces outside the home (displacement) the daily act of homeworking became unbearable for some and created tensions among the individuals and the act of homeworking since it became imposed and not self-defined as it used to be. Although the sample was rather small and generalisations cannot be made, it should be noted that those employed in the domestic market appeared to have more complex geographies, meaning that they chose to work from another place than their home more often and as a result described more intense feelings of displacement. This could be attributed to

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the fact that it could be easier for them to work with other people, potentially coworkers, or even more meaningful to connect with other professionals living in Athens (like the example of Rachel, through a coworking space). It could also be due to the fact that all respondents employed for non-domestic firms mentioned the need for repeated phone or video calls and although they did not explicitly exclude supplementary workspaces due to that, it can be assumed to have affected their level of mobility. With that in mind, it could be noted that perhaps remote work still requires coordination and the high frequency of video calls eventually does not truly ‘liberate’ remote workers from office-like conditions.

The analysis of the geographies cannot be done separately from the field upon which they grew. The city of Athens was discussed in relation to the facilities and infrastructure offerred or the degree to which it is considered to be ‘remote-friendly’. For many, Athens does not fulfill the demands that digital freelancing imposes upon them - for instance, the lack of stable and fast internet is crucial since all digital professions are heavily reliant on that. Τhe comments on the unaffordability of coworking spaces or even of cafes should be taken into account and it should be noted that they were mainly expressed from respondents employed from domestic firms, therefore those of the lower income level among the sample. As a result, although Athens is considered to have lower prices on daily cost of life when compared to other cities -especially in Northern Europe-, it appears that the income levels do not correspond to the options of non-home workspaces, leading to the assumption that Athens is not ‘remote-friendly’ for digital freelancers employed by the domestic market. This condition appears to construct a reality heading towards the formation of a niche of remote workers disconnected from the reality of the country as a whole.

In addition, some of the respondents commented that the ambitions of Greece 2.0 (see Chapter III, par. 4.2) appear to be unrealistic for them, since Athens cannot support remote work in their view.

The comments referring to that were often general and not specific, expressing a disbelief about the potential of Athens to grow into a node of the digital economy. This can be attributed to a feeling of insecurity which is assumed to be related to two things. First, the chronic recession of Greece has inevitably shaped a mindset of continuous insecurity and precarity, especially among young people who are highly likely to have tried to establish themselves in the labour market and failed. Second, and within the same context, the prioritisation of the attraction of digital nomads and the orientation of policy-making towards the broadening of the tourism industry comes at the expense of domestic workers who find tax regulations, minimum wages and working conditions to be unbeneficial for them. As a result, it appears that Athens is aiming to enter this new level of competition among cities and take part in the global map of the digital economy without necessarily having the provided ground to do so.

R.Q.2: How do digital freelancers organise the micro-geographies of homework?

As said, the space of home was in all cases the primal space of work. Homeworking was most often a condition that came within a household or a housing structure which was not necessarily appropriate to host it, therefore it was defined by the structure and ongoing dynamics of each household. Inevitably, during the lockdown homeworking was severely affected. What was already a challenging balance for some met the weight of the direct or indirect implications of the lockdown, as illustrated in Scheme 3.

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Scheme 3:The elements of homeworking, before COVID (left) and the additional during the lockdown (right)

Μost of the boundary setting strategies that were described during the interviews referred to the space of the home. Scheme 4 depicts coping strategies as they were described for the pre-COVID period and are mostly related to the spatial adjustment of the workspace inside the home as well as gaining control over working hours. In general, the spatial strategies used most often had an additional temporal goal, and the two were not always different actions but an overall spatio-temporal restriction effort. The supplementary workspaces functioned as an important coping strategy, both of temporal restriction since they enable the organisation of a more fixed temporal schedule, and of spatial differentiation among the workspace and the personal space since for many respondents the ultimate boundary setting strategy was to leave home and work from another place.

Scheme 4: Spaces of work and coping strategies pre-COVID

According to the respondents in most cases overworking was ultimately inevitable, in spite of the variety of the strategies they had invented. This phenomenon was even more intense during the lockdown, since the loss of other aspects of daily life made it even harder to stop working from home, within a broader context of the dissolution of time or preexisting daily schedules. It shows 43

that a core problematic element of digital freelancing is that of overwork, or the so-called ‘burnout’, which was described by the respondents similarly to how it was reported on previous research and eventually similarly to how it was promoted as a positive element of professional freedom from freelance platforms (see Chapter II, par. 1.2). Adding to that, homeworking was also commented negatively in relation to the levels of productivity. Some of the respondents referred to the difficulty of achieving to be productive when working from home, either due to feelings of laziness or boredom, or due to the constant distractions inside the same space, which also led to overwork due to the failure to conduct the tasks needed within the working hours. Such testaments severely question the opinion that working from home is more relaxing therefore more productive, aligning with a body of literature that also rejects this view as was discussed in Chapter II. Beyond the intensification of overwork, the practical absence of alternative workspaces during the lockdown forced the respondents to alter their boundary setting methods. The preexisting coping strategies the respondents had invented had to be reshaped, reinforced and eventually internalised inside the boundaries of the home. In this case, the housing structure acted as a significant parameter but not in a unifold manner. On one hand, those living alone had more intense feelings of isolation and faced more difficulty in placing temporal boundaries, due to the fact that they did not have another activity to do or another person to communicate with even inside the house. However, those living with their partner did not describe an ideal condition either, since the cohabitant’s telework could be an additional problem to the spatial establishment of work inside the home, forcing them to invent new coping strategies as well.

Scheme 5: Spaces of work and coping strategies during COVID

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R.Q.3:How do digital freelancers evaluate the spatio-temporal organisation of their work and what are the implications on other aspects of their daily life?

Reflecting on their work-life balance, respondents evaluated their experience in different ways. The nature of the profession and the degree to which the individual considered their work to be pleasant were significant factors. It can be stated that above all, the level of income played an important role in these diverging experiences. The difference is spotted in the country of employment which eventually appears to shape entirely different realities and perspectives. Beyond that, most of the respondents focused on the isolation and loneliness that remote work may involve. The new world of work bears entirely new social relations and the possible disappearance of camaraderie. Considering the evolution of the world of work as described in Chapter II, the tendency towards entrepreneuralisation (Rossi & Di Bella, 2017) and the increased competition involved in freelance platforms (see Chapter II, par. 1.1) shape an image of an increasingly individualised reality.

Yet it was clear from all the respondents with no exception that they would not change their freelance professions. Even when acknowledging negative issues like the aforementioned, all of them enjoyed the lack of hierarchies, over-pressing superiors and working by the clock, coping to get through the workday. The flexibility of their professions enables them to take larger breaks when needed and continue in their own time, and even if they try to refrain from this structure of their workday to avoid working all day they do find this prestigious. For some, the flexibility and freedom of their professions gave them the ability to plan their lives more freely and to consider working while on vacation and although none of the respondents has followed this as a lifestyle, some considered doing so. The rise of such work trends, like digital nomadism, cannot be ignored since the existence of such examples and the idealised liberty of such a lifestyle may create an imaginary.

Even if they may not do so, the idea that one’s work could allow them to travel while working and to not worry about taking days off from their employer appeared to give the respondents a sentiment of autonomy that they all without exception enjoyed.

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IX. DISCUSSION The research was conducted during a challenging period and the limitations imposed due to COVID led to a restricted number of nine respondents with whom contact was mostly digital. This was a barrier that could not be surpassed and the primary cost was the inability to conduct the interviews within the various workspaces under discussion. This could probably have supplied the discussion with more visual stimuli and provide a more narrative manner of interviewing. Despite that, the research is considered to be complete in its own scope, since the interviews nevertheless provided a good start for the exploration of the various patterns that emerge. The stories of the respondents were very dense and rich in content. Many discussed the evolution of their personal worklife geography as it has unfolded over the years through changing households, habits and so on, providing material for in-depth analysis, which led to the construction of what is believed to be a descriptive set of motifs for the digital freelancers of Athens.

Throughout the research there were some elements noted that could be useful for future research or for the better and more complete image of what was explored in this thesis. The input of the chosen group was interesting, since they were professionals who had experienced remote work before COVID. The fact that they did not enter this sector due to pandemic conditions and had already devoted time into shaping their own pace and reality within the condition of remote work provided useful patterns and a diversity of strategies due to their past experience. An interesting comparison could be made with ‘newcomers’ in online labour, a group which is expected to boom in the direct future. A comparison of pre-COVID and post-COVID realities would be very enriching in the sense that agency would function on different levels while the structures and facilities to support remote work are expected to change in a much more advanced manner. Lastly, another issue worthy of research would be the exploration of worklife geographies of people who have children, including even a more gendered lens in respect of the balancing of childcare and homework.

Having completed the entire process of the thesis, from the first idea that sparked the exploration of this subject to the shaping of the research questions, the interviews and their analysis, there are some key points that I find intriguing. The first one concerns the global scale of labour transformations. Despite the fact that globalisation is clearly evident in many aspects of daily life, I found the blanket alterations that COVID brought to be an unprecedented factor for the shaping of new realities. Still experiencing and trying to make sense of the bizarre conditions the restrictions have created for everyone, the question of what is to come and what will be the eventual imprint requires a lot of attention, both on an academic and on a social level.

The second point that drew my interest was the future of work relations and the extent to which we are facing a rapid dismantling of working rights in the name of flexibility, innovation, independence or other equivalent buzzwords. The discourse that is constructed within the platform economy entails elements that I consider to be crucial for what is being normalised as a lifestyle of overwork, extreme levels of stress and precarity, constant chase of a career and of the capitalist promise of happiness. This impression was intensified during the interviews and the analysis process, since the transformations in the field of labour are not yet established in the context of Athens. As a result, I had some very interesting discussions with people who were realising how their work life is changing and some were deeply problematized with the aforementioned issues. With that in mind, the third and final point that I noted was the power of the interview process. Even within the narrow

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framework of a thesis being conducted during the pandemic, I believe that the personal experiences that were documented, analysed and correlated with the global processes that occur are extremely useful in understanding the down-to-earth impact and help make academic research an even more valuable tool.

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APPENDIX: INTERVIEW GUIDE The interview guide was used in order to lead the discussion with the interviewees. In many cases the respondents would narrate their stories in a different way than expected and designed in the guide, however all the topics mentioned here were discussed with each one of the interviewees.

Disclaimer This interview is conducted within the frame of my thesis project as a Master’s student in Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam. With your consent, the interview will be recorded. The material of the interview will be used only by the interviewer and nicknames will be attributed to the participants in order to maintain anonymity.

Introduction Tell me about your work: -What is your profession?

-How long have you been practicing it?

-Was the remote work arrangement your choice?

Tell me about your housing condition: -Do you live alone or with others? What are the relationships?

Spaces of work before COVID -Where did you work from before COVID? On what criteria?

-Which of the spaces you worked from was most suitable for you? Why? -What else is going on in the space where you work? Is it disturbing or distracting?

COVID -How was your work routine affected by COVID? -How do you see this situation affecting your work in the future?

Spatial and temporal strategies -Do you feel the need to place boundaries to your work? (space & time) -How do you do that?

-Do you feel you have control over your work?

Athens -How do you evaluate Athens as a city for remote work?

-What does a freelancer need from a city and does Athens provide that?

-Would you consider relocating? Why/Why not?

Overall evaluation -Overall, how would you evaluate remote work?

-Would you consider switching to a different working arrangement? Why/Why not?

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