Abstract: Planning for healthy, well-functioning cities should include consideration to the diversity and vitality of home based enterprises. This can be enabled through advances in economic geography explaining the role of ongoing changes in the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) sector on the way the work is organised and carried out. Although in this research field ICT is commonly regarded as facilitator of work from anywhere, attention of researchers is predominantly focused on implementation and analysis of telework strategies. Our paper is an attempt to provide a better understanding of the impacts of work from anywhere on cities, through analysis of a spatial distribution of home based workers in Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas. The research explores the correlation between home based workforce and socio-economic status of local government areas using 2011 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data. It also considers the role of distance from major cities as factor influencing home based work in regional areas.

Results highlight a significant positive correlation between socio-economic qualities and the homebased workforce within the two major cities and their urban-rural fringes. In regional parts of New South Wales and Victoria the distribution of home-based workers is not related to the socio-economic qualities of areas but is strongly correlated with distance from major cities. This spatial arrangement provides an opportunity to delineate and map the distribution of lifestyle home based workers. These findings contribute to a better understanding of locational preferences of home based workforce and implication of these on city and regional planning and development.