Valley of the Commons
A village built on common ground.
Valley of the Commons is a four-week pop-up village by a nascent network society envisioning life beyond extractive systems.
Rooted at commons hub and held by the forests, mountains, and open skies of the Austrian Alps, this gathering is a living commons shared in work and study, in making and care, in governance and everyday life.
Together, we lay the foundations for permanence by exploring housing, production, decision-making and ownership in community.
Pop-Up Event to Seed the Valley
24 August 2026 - 20 September 2026
Valley of the Commons emerges from years of hands-on experimentation with long-format community events. From co-organizing Zu-villages and Invisible Gardens to bootstrapping the commons hub, our team has ample experience in prototyping early nodes of future societies.
Over the last few years, popups have evolved into a cultural phenomenon: distributed communities gathering for multiple weeks to test new forms of living, governance, and collective purpose. These experiments have produced invaluable insights into technical innovations, governance mechanisms and financial tools enabling future network societies.
Building on that momentum, we believe it is time to shift gears - to make the social, productive, and infrastructural commons as tangible as the tech stack beneath.
The Popup is designed as a practice-oriented phase of preparation toward our own permanence. Over four weeks, participants will actively explore central aspects of a future settlement in theory and practice, while building relationships, clarifying shared priorities, and co-shaping the first real building blocks of the commons-centric network society waiting to be born.
The program will revolve around three guiding themes:
- Cosmo-local production and open value accounting
- Nomad-friendly communal life in housing co-ops
- Horizontal governance and funding mechanisms
The Return of the Commons
Across Europe and beyond, digital workers, post-corporate professionals, and remote-friendly entrepreneurs seek grounded, cooperative ways of living, beyond the isolation of the metropolis and the fragility of atomized nomadism.
This turn toward intentional communities is a structural process enabled by remote work, motivated by a longing for connection and nature, and driven by the need to hedge against rising volatility from climate shocks, fragile supply chains, precarious employment, and social or environmental degradation.
As corporate capitalism fails harder and harder, the urgent need for socio-technical systems, resilient enough to endure the coming decades, becomes apparent. The concepts are here, but we need real places, shared practices, and long-term structures to anchor them in daily life. This is why we build the Valley of the Commons.