Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) "We looked at a few different spaces," says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain &amp "It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money," says Morgan, "but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business." they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. "It doesn't feel like being a tenant," says Wood. "The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members." We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations industry- and sector-coworking spaces more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman &amp Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, "Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue." At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. "RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks," she says, "and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building." Aware that "tech companies were doing something funkier", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch. Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world. The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are. What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7) The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun. Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions:  first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that? WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking' but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.

<question>:
What is the main reason for the increase in popularity in co-working spaces?

<options>:
A Corporate offices downsizing their physical operations
B Main offices becoming too expensive
C Collaboration between companies becoming more commonplace
D A lack of real estate for individual offices

<answer>:

A