Valley of the Commons

Why here, why now?

Across Europe, villages like ours have been emptying out. Younger generations move to the cities, industries collapse, and what remains are elderly residents, shuttered factories, and a crumbling social fabric. Meanwhile, the digital nomad movement, the rise of smart villages, and the accelerating meta-crisis point towards a different trajectory: people are looking for ways out of the metropolis, towards self-sufficient and regenerative forms of life.

Our setting is uniquely well-suited for this transition.

• Resilient resources: The surrounding mountains cool the air and provide Vienna's drinking water, while the valleys in between contain fertile land.
• Space to grow: An abundance of vacant houses, commercial spaces and agricultural lots makes expansion affordable and welcomed by locals.
• Connectivity: One hour by train to Vienna and 90 minutes to the airport position us right at the center of Europe's rail and air connections.

With local conditions ripe and global pressures rising, it's time to turn opportunity into action and start building. The future is shaped by the actions we take today.

From hub to valley

The commons hub already anchors this process. Battle-tested as an event venue and guesthouse, it hosts everything from collaborative finance conferences, solarpunk meetups, and activist gatherings to academic workshops and prototyping sessions. To an emerging Valley of the Commons, it provides:

• An economic engine: providing jobs, visibility, and a constant stream of curious people seeking alternatives to the status quo;
• A platform for entrepreneurship: supporting new event series, research projects, product prototyping, and startup incubation;
• A beacon for metamodern thought and imagination: holding space for narratives that orient us beyond collapse.

Housing the future

A key pillar of the valley will be housing — not "smart homes" full of gadgets, but dwellings designed for the real challenges of the 21st century: climate change, resource constraints, and hyper-mobile lifestyles. We envision:

• Renovated houses integrating state-of-the-art sustainable living concepts;
• Cooperative ownership: from permanent co-housing to time-share models and shorter-term rentals;
• Distributed governance: each house organized by its residents, following the principle of subsidiarity.

The commons hub GmbH is a pragmatic bootstrap, but the valley itself will be community-owned and self-governed. Our role is to provide initial momentum — network, knowledge, infrastructure, and capital — then step back.

Production and self-sufficiency

The Valley of the Commons won't just be a place to live — it will be a place to collaboratively produce value in diverse ways:

• Digital production in communal co-working spaces;
• Physical production in co-owned FabLabs seeking to develop innovative niche products and providing local manufacturing for community needs;
• Basic needs provision: 100% water and energy self-sufficiency asap, while gradually building food resilience through community farming.

In this way, production cycles will not only create a semi-autonomous local economy, but also build the capacity to provide for livelihoods and withstand future global disruptions.

Governance and community

A key challenge in the political realm consists of balancing local autonomy with collective coherence, while also rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor through cooperative ownership and participatory governance. Guided by the principle of subsidiarity, we envision:

• Co-owned and self-governed houses and productive units;
• Village-wide commons coordinated through collectively chosen mechanisms;
• Integration with municipal politics based on mutual recognition and complementarity.

A growing campus, a growing commons

The immediate next step on this journey is the expansion of the hub into a monastery-like Event Campus capable of hosting summits, exhibitions, and popups. To make this happen, we are running a community lending campaign, raising €200k in loans from our network to secure and renovate the buildings. Over €80k have already been pledged, with some lenders even donating their interest back to support future events.

Supporting the church expansion lays the groundwork for the Valley of the Commons — the first step toward a campus that could grow into a vibrant village.