Problem addressed

Rural regions across Germany—especially in the former East—are living through a compounding crisis that is both material and social: demographic shrinkage, physical decay, the thinning of civic life, and political radicalization feed each other. They accumulate into a pervasive sense among rural and small town residents of being left behind by the mainstream economy, by infrastructure decisions, and by national attention. The most concrete symptom is the quiet disappearance of shared or “third” places. A former school that no longer has children, a village pub that cannot survive without regulars, a church or farm building that sits locked and unheated—these are not just “properties.” They are where people once met, argued, worked, organized help, and experienced a sense that their town was more than just a loose collection of houses. When those spaces go dark, the loss is both tangible and symbolic: it is the loss of the everyday infrastructure through which a community recognizes itself. 

With the collapse of such places, where civic participation is a habit rather than an event, political conversation migrates to digital platforms that reward outrage and simplify complex realities into camps and enemies.

Germany’s growth-oriented economic logic concentrates capital, infrastructure, and opportunity in urban centers. As the population in many rural areas thins and ages, “critical mass” disappears: schools close, doctors relocate, buses run less often or not at all. Each closure makes the next one more likely. 

Resulting vacancies turn this demographic story into one of physical landscape abandonment. Around 16% of residential units in East Germany are vacant—often in poor structural condition requiring full renovation—compared to roughly 2–3.5% in urban and western regions. Beyond housing, disused schools, manor houses, and train stations stand as permanent markers of neglect. Repurposing is complex: long-neglected structures can be expensive to stabilize, and heritage protections or permit requirements can make timelines uncertain and financing difficult. In practice, vacancy becomes a category of “burden”—something to be disposed of—rather than a civic infrastructure resource worth  developing for the future. 

The political consequences are obvious: in national and state elections, the right wing forces are becoming more and more powerful - threatening to overtake whole states in the next elections. This democratic erosion is also spatial: vacant buildings are increasingly contested as organizing infrastructure. Far-right groups have recently included reviving third places in the countryside such as village pubs as a strategic priority to reshape local loyalties.  

There have been attempts at rural renewal. Across structurally weak regions, people and collectives, many of them coming from urban backgrounds, have tried to revive former infrastructure and vacant buildings in the countryside. Most have fallen into bankruptcy or stalled, with little sign of them today: a German researcher described a “long history of failure” from lack of resources and internal conflicts. Interest in countryside living has grown again since the Covid pandemic, but it does not automatically repair social fabric: newcomers can bring values and aesthetics that long-rooted residents experience as foreign or moralizing, or a kind of “land consumption,” renovating vacancies for private use without creating any shared benefit and risking a “us versus them” dynamic that is precisely the emotional terrain in which authoritarian narratives thrive. 

Meanwhile, community-led alternatives struggle to take root because there is no shared knowledge infrastructure for rural pioneers to learn cooperative ownership, financing, building permits, and community integration without starting from zero; only about 6% of EU startups are located in rural areas, and most initiatives collapse after the initial round of funding ends or a founder leaves. The crisis is therefore not only that rural places are emptying—it is that the systems that could help communities reclaim their own shared spaces at scale remain fragmented, under-resourced, and too often outpaced by actors with very different intentions. 

Rural, place-based community projects are hybrid by nature: part real estate, part civic life, part local economy, part climate and land use, part democratic participation. That makes them hard to fund, hard to permit, and hard to explain in the language of committees and administrations. They are also contested and urgent: whoever turns an empty school, pub, or farm into the place where people gather, gets to shape local belonging. 

To foster the development of place-based community projects throughout the countryside visibility and recognition towards politics and a holistic support system are needed.

Innovative solution

Founded in 2018, Netzwerk Zukunftsorte connects, inspires and shares knowledge for the development of community-based places in rural areas as resilient spaces for social innovation as well as economic and ecological resiliance. Community-based living and working projects in villages and small towns serve as models and experimental hubs for practical climate protection, social cohesion, social entrepreneurship and regional development through the revitalisation of vacant spaces as well as nature and climate protection.
As a network, we make good examples visible (www.zukunftsorte.land/orte), connect actors and stakeholders, organise knowledge transfer and provide recommendations to policy makers.
So far, we have around 80 projects on our map across Germany. In our scaling strategy we want to add several hundred Future Places in the DACH region within the next 3 years and aim at transferring the knowledge and network infrastructure to other European countries.

VISIBILITY AND AWARDS FOR IMPACT PLACES 
In order to identify future locations, we have developed our own criteria to ensure that projects have a positive impact on their region. These criteria relate to standards in terms of the attitude to the common good and its implementation within the projects: Establishment of open meeting places and facilities, integration into the region, sustainable construction, regenerative lifestyles and much more.
We recognise projects that meet these criteria as Impact Places and put them with an attractive profile on our Map. Our community reports that the Impact Place label is a great help in gaining the support of government decision-makers and potential investors.
We are currently working on linking the criteria to an impact measurement for Impact Places. This should make it even easier to communicate the impact of projects in the future. This year we are also launching the Future Places Award. These will be visible as outstanding model projects and thus inspire imitation.

ENABLEING EXCHANGE
One of the core tasks of our network is to organise exchanges between creators of Impact Places. We do this through countless digital meet-ups, where project makers talk about their places, processes, challenges and solutions, and experts give tips on relevant topics. There is also an annual networking event that brings together hundreds of people from the future places community. These events are cited by our Impact Places community as essential in giving them the strength, energy and support to continue with their challenging projects.

ORGANISING KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
Knowledge is essential to the successful development and operation of Impact Places. Our knowledge platform (https://wissen.zukunftsorte.land) provides project developers, local authorities and owners with access to tried and tested practical knowledge. In addition to instructions, checklists and model projects, you will also find personal experiences in the form of videos and audio contributions.
Our publications, at least one per year, share specific expertise that has become highly valued and popular in the field of urban and regional development.

ADVOCACY AND POLITICAL DIALOGUE
We see it as our task to engage in dialogue with local, state and federal politicians to promote better framework conditions that facilitate the development and operation of Impact Places. For example, in terms of building law, commercial regulations or public-interest operator structures. With regard to financing and funding opportunities, we advocate low-threshold loans and funding programmes that take into account the social impact of projects.
At the local level, we lobby for administrative support for Impact Place players.

Key results and benefits

Since 2020 our organisation has been instrumental in raising public and political awareness of the potential of community-focused property development in rural areas. We coined the term 'Future Places' to describe impact-driven co-living and co-working projects in the countryside - a term now adopted by many other organisations and government bodies. Thanks to the visibility of our Future Place projects, our publications and the policy dialogue we lead, funding programmes now include more and more of what we promote as crucial to their development.
With our help, many Future Places have been founded and stabilised. Their founders repeatedly emphasise the importance of our network in the complex and challenging process of setting up and sustaining their projects. They say that being part of a community of like-minded people is just as important as the low-threshold access to useful practical knowledge and dialogue with other founders.

In terms of service and projects our biggest achievements have been so far are:
- 50 Future Places (and those in construction) on our map, selected according to our impact criteria: https://zukunftsorte.land/orte
- Impact matrix with a set of 9 impact criteria and explicit indicators (being the first NGO with an eleborate impact matrix for place based projects): https://zukunftsorte.land/zukunftsorte-kriterien
- Presentation of the first ‘Zukunftsorte’ Award (worth: 10k) based on our impact criteria in 2026
- Hundreds of digital meetups of founders and experts exchanging knowledge
- social media and newsletter reach of 8000+ people
- an expanded digital knowledge base of practical knowledge for project initiators and municipalities
- an additional network (https://starke-orte.land) for municipal players
- a networking centre for cooperative vacancy development at state level (https://wir-raeume.land)
- having been part of numerous national research projects around social innovation, social entrepreneurship and rural development

Our biggest projects in the making:
- a central learning and consulting platform for founders in the DACH region (launch in 10/2026): Zukunftsorte Lab

Potential for mainstreaming

Potential for EU-wide transfer 
- Implementation of our adapted network structure in other EU countries carried out by national organisations
- creation of an EU wide knowledge platform based on the Zukunftsorte knowledge base
- exchange about impact criteria and measurement for place-based social innovation projects, adaption of our openc source criteria for different EU countries
- creation of an EU-wide expert pool for the support of projects, scientific studies and policy development