Day 77: WeWork

Dinner:

• Lasagne végétarienne
• Salade verte
• Pêche au yaourt de brebis
• Carré de chocolat noir

As an operational consultant most of my work is done at client premises or from home using internet and skype.  However, on a regular basis I do need to have physical meetings with people who report to me or with candidates that we might recruit.  Until now I have had these meetings in cafés, in client premises or at my house none of which seem appropriate to me.  But since last week I have taken a subscription to WeWork which is the office equivalent of BlaBlaCar or AirBnB.  WeWork takes over whole building and transform them into modern, airy, uncluttered spaces with hotdesks, meeting rooms, recreation rooms, private telephone areas coffee areas and lounge areas, all on a shared basis.  As you may have noticed I am a big fan of the shared economy and this is a great example.  Most people don't need to be in the office everyday and everything that we work on in offices nowadays are on computers so you don't need filing cabinets with lots of papers. 

Aside from being a pleasant working environment it feels much less wasteful.  If this system was generalised in big cities it would have a massive impact on the housing market.  There is close to 60 million m2 of  office space in the Paris area if we used the WeWork system we could probably free up at least 20 million m2 for transformation into housing, that would represent  400,000 apartments with room for 1 million people.  I'm pretty sure that would go a long way towards resolving the housing and homeless problem in our cities.