Digital 52 4️⃣ - Paving the way for sustainability in coworking, the story of Nest City Lab.

Read the story of Nest City Lab on page 124 of "Around The World in 250 Coworking Spaces".

The space you are about to discover today is one of the very first coworking spaces we met when our journey around the world began. There is an “imperfectly” written article on our blog, dated 2016, which we called “Crushing on Apocapoc”, and I can say for sure that this title is still accurate 7 years later.

Throughout the years, we’ve loved following Val, Sebastien, and Fabien grow in their coworking journey, one that has always revolved around sustainability. Convinced that there are many ways we can build a better future for all, the trio has used coworking and its model to bring together a resilient community.

Beyond everything, their focus, their exemplarity, and their beautiful ways of doing business with a purpose have been a constant source of inspiration for our team.

Whether you know a lot or not much about how sustainability can be approached at work, you are about to gift yourself a 5 minutes mastermind session on the topic.

Welcome to Barcelona, Welcome to Nest City Lab!

➡️ A little refresher

Who’s behind the featured space?

Valerie Aubert Pietri, Sebastien Detroyat, Fabien Franceschini, and more recently Sandra Martin Lara who is the co-creator of the physical space.

“We are friends and met at different stages of our life. Sandra is one of our members and supporter from the beginning of our journey. We are proud now to have her as a co-founder.”

➡️ Key Figures

• Opening year: 2013
• Size of the space: From 200 sqm (2,000 sqft) with Apocapoc to 1,800 sqm (18,000 sqft) at Nest City Lab

➡️ A little tour around Nest City Lab

➡️ Behind-the-scenes

Things you didn't read in aw250cs

➡️ Nest City Lab Today

On a sunny afternoon, I invited Val, one of the co-founders, to catch up on everything that happened since the release of our book. I had the chance to spend some time with Val in the past (in-person or remote) and all those moments spent together have left a positive mark on my entrepreneurial journey. Her energy and her passion are contagious and even today, as I am transcribing and summarizing our recorded conversation, I get a big smile while tapping on my keyboard, and by scrolling down you’ll understand why.

Where does Nest City Lab stand today and what’s next?

Keep reading!

💫 Going New Directions

💬 What has Nest City Lab brought to your overall mission?

Nest City Lab allowed us to develop on a more impactful scale everything we had done in Apocapoc. Suddenly, it made it possible to imagine how, at the level of a larger territory, all the efforts that are made at Nest City Lab can have an impact. We can also measure our real attractiveness: we are no longer talking about 40 or 70 members, we are talking about many more.

Through a bigger space, we see that there is a real demand for what we are offering, it is not something built for a micro niche. We understand that we are in a niche, but it is not as small as we believed it was.

I shared earlier that we opened a new space which is called Alma. Alma is the continuation of our journey towards raising awareness of the planetary issues and personal issues we are facing. It provides a space where we can all get involved to innovate and change what is necessary.

Nest City Lab is not just a workplace, it is also a living space and a learning space filled with new daily positive habits we want to learn about collectively. It was important to start again with something that was much more poetic, to reactivate all the storytelling that we have about the world we want.

Nest City Lab, by its architectural constitution and by the intention we lend to it, allows us to do that. Nest City Lab and Alma are two distant spaces, but they are linked, naturally and physically. Those two distinct spaces allow our community to express themselves at different times of the day, in different ways.

💬 In our initial interview, you said I’ll quote “.” Can you expand on the notion of unlearning? How is Apocapoc different from Nest City Lab?

Culturally and contextually we still have the same needs as human beings, but we are born into a cultural context that promotes a certain way of life, which is the way of life where all resources will be unlimited, and all my wishes are realizable. That's what we were taught. That's what we learned from a very young age.

It has developed even more in recent years with the fantasy of “I can do everything”, and “I can be whoever I want. With the exacerbation of the “I” in social media, in personal branding, et cetera.

All of this has been transmitted culturally and it is part of the mainstream culture. We are made of that and we are all starting to collectively realize that this whole system is going bankrupt and above all, it does not keep its promises. It does not allow us to really be fulfilled, healthy and joyful, and even to have regular access to happiness. There, is a lot more loneliness, a lot more disconnection, and a lot of meaninglessness.

To be able to recover all that, you must first unlearn all the habits that you have cultivated for years in a system of ultra-consumption. That’s the first part.

And then there is another part that is more about the myth of infinite resources that we were led to believe. We depend on nobody, we can do everything ourselves and money can buy everything. This myth of disconnection also generated a lot of loneliness and a lot of individualism.

The reality is we are all connected, as a being to other beings, but also, in general, to nature and the environment and to the universe. That means we need to rethink how we position ourselves in our lives and how to position ourselves in our ecosystem, in our world, and understanding that everything is connected, that we are not isolated as it has been transmitted to us at some point in the culture in which we were born.

It was important to us as founders to unlearn all of that, to reclaim this awareness that the connection existed. We had to see it and feed it.

💬 In our initial interview you also talked about the LEED Platinum certification, why was it important to receive such certification for Nest City Lab?

For us, this is important because it is a methodology that is very clear, international, and which is applied by many professionals who have at heart the protection of the planet and the environment, but also of users, from a health perspective of the humans inside.

This is something we knew we wanted to obtain since started with our first space.

At the time, we didn't have the resources or the need to be publicly recognized through this methodology. But when we moved from Apocapoc to Nest City Lab, which is a much bigger project, it felt very important to us to have this public recognition, following the rigor that such certification requires.

It comes down to writing down, understanding, and measuring everything that is put in place. This certification is key when it comes to understanding what sustainable development is all about.

It creates a common understanding between in the team that worked on the physical part of the space, the team that manages it, and the users (our members).

Through the certification, we can raise more awareness about sustainability and make people understand what is the whole approach behind the space we created and how we can capitalize on this approach by changing our daily practices.

We were able to do a lot of things from an implementation point of view. But, if we keep on leaving everything on when we leave a room, it's just useless. Power consumption will be the same. So to have someone external to our project who certifies all these steps, but above all who legitimizes all these steps, allows us to have more weight towards our members, and our teams, to do this all together.

💬 COVID-19 entered our lives more than 2 years ago now. What was its impact and did it change anything for the overall vision behind Nest City Lab?

It's a matter of perception as we didn’t do any analysis or survey on the matter within our community.

We felt that there was recognition for the effort we made, to remain open during all the lockdowns and all the somewhat complicated periods, despite all the restrictions, and despite all the legislation applied to be able to stay open.

We felt that it was a service that we owed to our members and the territory. We know that our space is a breathing space and that during COVID, it was super important for all humans to be able to breathe because there were many, many constraints and so we felt the recognition of two things:

It is first of all the impact of the place on the members. They understood how much this place made them feel good.

And then the recognition of the need to be connected and to be in a community, which we were able to do because we have a lot of space. And so instead of being in complete isolation, there's this connection that was being maintained and so now it's pretty obvious to everybody that it's important to be connected and it's important to be able to share, exchange in a place that is good and which is in favor of general health which includes your psychological, emotional and even intellectual state.

COVID has made it possible to value the work that we do.

➡️ Reflections on Building Nest City Lab

💬 What has been your biggest learning out of bringing to life AND growing Nest City Lab?

It is a very complex question, I must admit.

I’d say that Within the framework of a community and a space that is focused on providing an experience, you have to allow time and stray away from systematically forcing things.

You have to observe and adapt in real time. Grow with the notion of slowness, of understanding what is happening and not reacting right away. I find it so important. Our branding is not ultra-commercial and we do not work towards an artificial creation of value. We want things to happen in a very organic way and so for that, it takes time.

​​Perhaps we could achieve the same result by pushing things with an ultra-consumerist spirit, constantly creating events, doing excessive communication, and so on, but the objective is not to get there with this process.

The objective is to create a community that has a certain form of cohesion because it has grown over time. And with that comes the other side of the coin, when you're impatient, sometimes there's frustration because you want things to go faster, awareness to go faster, and habits to change more quickly.

This impatience is exhausting.

We always try to strike the right balance between understanding that things take time and that we should not worry. Things happen in life when they need to happen.

💬 What would be your best advice to someone thinking about opening a coworking space?

It would be to take care of yourself first.

The opening of a physical space with human beings inside who are human and therefore have many demands and desires is extremely demanding. There are a lot of parameters that we cannot control. You have to take care of yourself during the entire process in order not to burn out or succeed in creating what you wanted, but not succeed in enjoying it or taking pleasure in the creation process itself.

I think that we must not forget ourselves in the equation, we are part of the project.

💬 If you could chat with coworking operators now, what would you like to ask them?

If you wish to reply to Val's question, share your answers in the comments!

💬 And if you could chat with coworking members?

I would like to ask them what would it take for them to succeed in overcoming their posture as coworkers and moving on to a posture as an active citizen.

💬 Last but not least, what’s your biggest dream for Nest City Lab?

Our greatest aspiration is really to succeed in building an ultra-resilient and ultra-activist community, that is to say, one that will succeed in having an impact locally throughout the territory and to transmit all this culture and energy we create exponentially.

The new virus is to have a resilient and activist community that thinks about having regenerative practices and puts them in place.

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See you next week for Digital 52 5️⃣!

And if you missed previous Digital 52's, check them out below.