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Home-based work is good for the city, town and village. It contributes to making neighbourhoods busier, and therefore livelier and safer. It stimulates the local economy, as home-based workers tend to use local services, and helps to strengthen local social networks.

This section looks at ways cities can be built to support and encourage home-based work. Work in progress, it starts to look at urban design strategies, often based on historic precedent, appropriate to home-based work.

In particular, strategies are included that start to address the disadvantages of home-based work. Whilst this working practice offers many benefits to the individual and to society at large, there are also well-documented disadvantages. The most regularly reported include social isolation, difficulty creating an appropriate social and spatial separation between the dwelling and workplace elements of the workhome, a lack of exercise and a tendency to distraction.

The design of the neighbourhood, as well as the individual building, can help to reduce all of these difficulties.

 



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