• RES-MOVE project: Austrian report bei BEST Institute for vocational training

"Alternative forms of Value Creation

through "Join - In Spaces" combining learning, doing and sharing"

SLIDE 1 – Introduction

(2 Minuten)

Good afternoon,
and thank you to the BEST institute for inviting me to this conference, and for giving me the role of an initial input speaker. I am quite honored by that, considering the fact that there are a lof of CoWorking- and Collaborative Spaces around in Austria - but mostly in large cities.

So the idea of the organizers might have been to give you a fresh perspective on a large potential, one that is largely untapped or frustratingly disappointing at first glance from the perspective of migration and inclusion work: I am talking about rural areas.

My name is Franz Nahrada, sociologist and futurist. Eight years ago, I made a very unusual personal decision: I moved from Vienna to a rural region.

This was not a lifestyle change, but the consequence of a hypothesis I have been working on for more than forty years.

Slide 2: Key assumptions

You could call it a personal passion or intellectual obsession — shaped by key experiences in my life. The most important of these was the discovery that 'rural regions could gain entirely new development opportunities through the appropriate use of communication technologies.

Across Europe, rural regions are not simply declining — they are losing systemic density. Schools, workplaces, cultural spaces, and innovation structures drift apart.

Outmigration of youth after school, weak innovation ecosystems, and fragmentation of services and social life are well-known symptoms. But the deeper challenge is the loss of future regional capacity — a widening gap between the speed of urban innovation and rural adaptation.

At the same time, rural regions hold enormous potential for quality of life, while urban systems are increasingly affected by density stress and overload. So we are facing a double movement: rural disconnection on one side, urban saturation on the other. So my prime question became how to reconnect and reconcile these two sides. How can we create a win - win by solution connecting these two "silos" properly?

In searching for responses, I have worked across many fields connected to digital transformation. In Vienna we had seven Global Village Events, diving deep into systemic reconnections. Remote work and coworking were part of this exploration, especially at the beginning. But eventually I concluded that the highest leverage lies elsewhere — in the fields of education, culture, and science.

It is against this background that I founded DorfUni: an attempt to connect village-based life directly with centers of research and development.

Slide 3 – The local Context

From 2003 onwards, still living and working in Vienna, I was able to test these hybrid ideas together with a group of young entrepreneurs who returned to their village in South-East Styria.

They established a coworking space, but something unexpected happened: The learning activities that I suggested to them, initially called the "Flying Classroom" became more attractive than the working activities.

People came not primarily to work remotely, but to learn together, to exchange ideas, and to regularily connect with each other. It was a village gathering, often crammed full.

It was a small but very intense experiment in hybrid rural innovation.

But over time, we discovered something crucial.

A learning space alone is not enough.

It can create encounters, conversations, even inspiration — but it does not automatically create long-term vitality.

What was missing was something more fundamental:

shared practice.

Not just learning together, but doing things together.

Because only practice creates continuity.
Learning creates movement — but practice creates structure.

When I moved to Bad Radkersburg in 2017, a small town in the same region at the Austrian-Slovenian border, the original village experiment in Kirchbach had already and sadly ended.

But the idea of community impact learning survived and a small group - that managed the Austrian Hub of the international Transition movement inspired by Rob Hopkins - helped me to build DorfUni

We continued to experiment with hybrid learning formats, but I also began to understand that isolated initiatives are fragile. And when we were ready for takeoff in the beginning of 2020 - managing 6 simultaneous village events and one stream - , the COVID Crisis made it difficult or impossible to create common Learning Spaces.

We produced lots of online content in subsequent three years, but so did everybody else. This led to a massive burnout.

The learning was: what we needed was not more projects — but more permanence in practice. The first step was to truly anchor the project in a local context. That is easier said than done.

Slide 4 The discovery of FarmLab

The turning point came unexpectedly, in early July 2025 at the Global Fab Lab Conference in Brno.

There I learned that, almost unnoticed, a highly creative initiative called FarmLab had been evolving in my new home region for several years. Just a 15 minutes drive away north in Kapfenstein.

It was not formally visible as an “innovation project”, but it had already attracted international attention, residencies with amazing projects - as you can see on this slide which displays just a few.

We were not into CoMaking originally - but we learned that its impact is even greater than CoLearning ,

Slide 5 The mission of FarmLab

And what made it special was not only its structure and the professional experience from Barcelona the founders braught with them — but its embeddedness in everyday rural practice, its committment to local indigenous materials and its aim to connect tradition and innovation, preserve and support the farm in which it is embedded.

FarmLab revealed something very important: Innovation does not always appear as an institution or even as a widely publiziced activity

Sometimes it appears as a practice field — distributed, informal, but highly productive.

This changed my perspective fundamentally.

Because I realised:
we are not necessarily lacking innovations in rural areas.
We are lacking the infrastructures that makes them visible, connectable, and sustainable.

Slide 6 Rural Innovation Systems

Fortunately, a department for Rural Innovation in the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture (BMLUK) had exactly the same view.

They defined the vague buzzword "Smart Village" which haunted EU rural development circles for a decade or so not so much as digital endavour, but primarily as human networks and infrastructures that reach critical mass.

So they created a call for 'Rural Innovation Systems', Networks and Partnerships that have the prime purpose of revealing and awakening hidden regional potentials.

(GAP 77/3 supported by CAP funds, European Union, BMLUK and the agricultural department of the Styrian Government.)

Slide 7 Rural Innovation Systems (2)

They adressed something which is mostly ignored in traditional rural development schemes - where only the big and proven ones are usually recognized and rewarded.

They also emphasized value creation above education.

They also pointed to the importance of "Third Spaces". The old Village Inn might give place to something much more multifunctional.

Theyeven emphasized the importance of including marginalized and vulnerable groups - they secured the participation of women and youth as a must-have for each single application. (I think you can guess that there is a natural connection to Res - Move with its focus on migration and inclusion.)

This call set us in motion to literally *marry together* the concepts of learning spaces, coworking spaces and maker spaces. Find a common name that expresses the connection. Which led to ....

Slide 8 ...the Idea of "Mitmachräume"

In English, perhaps best translated as:

"Participation Spaces". Or "Join-In-Space"

Mitmachräume are not projects or programmes.

They are infrastructures of shared practice.

They combine:

• learning
• making
• social interaction
• and local problem-solving

A Mitmachraum combines several functions in one place.

• Part coworking space.
• Part makerspace.
• Part repair café.
• Part learning hub.
• Part community workshop room
• Part social commons.

There are invisible connections and benefits between these functions that we want to grow and harvest. That is what we see as "value creation"

Slide 9 ... Our project so far

Slide 10 ... Cornerstones

In Bad Radkersburg and the South-East of Styria, our modest goal is:
Five Mitmachräume in five years.
Not identical copies.
But locally adapted spaces.
One may focus on repair.
One on food innovation.
One on digital skills.
One on crafts.One on arts. One on Healing and Life skills.
One on intercultural entrepreneurship.
A network of complementing competence centers , not a franchise.

Each one with its own network and connections even far away.

Slide 11 ... Some assumptions on Relevance

Challenges in Rural Areas:

Integration of Migrants very difficult (job situation and lack of trust)

Rural depopulation.
Loneliness – generation gap
Lack of upskilling opportunities
Unused buildings.
And fragmented institutions.

''Usually we address these problems separately.
But perhaps they belong together.''

Why could in this situation Participation Spaces be powerful for integration?

Because doing things together reduces barriers.
Language barriers become smaller when repairing a bicycle together.
Cultural distance becomes smaller when cooking together.
Fear becomes smaller when building something together.
Skills become visible through action.
Trust grows through cooperation.

Slide 12 Conclusion: a possible match