The Last Room Standing: Why Rural Coworking is the Real Frontline of European Revitalisation
LinkedIn Show Notes #48 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen.
European Coworking Day is weeks away. ACTionism screenings are filling up across London, Europe, and as far as El Nido in Palawan.
Here in Vigo, we're running our first-ever European Coworking Day event: LiveGalicia, a pop-up coworking day at the incredible La Contenedora, right around the corner from our home. And a special shoutout to Fento Coworking—the first coworking space in Vigo to ever take part in European Coworking Day.
I've followed coworking since 2008. I lived in London, the city I know more about coworking than anywhere else on earth. I've visited hundreds of spaces across Europe, up mountains and in cities, through conferences, research trips, and the podcast.
Four years ago I moved to Galicia.
London taught me what coworking looks like at scale. Galicia is teaching me what it costs when nobody is watching.
How coworking works here. How hard it is to build anything in a village up a mountain in Spain. How radically different the reality is from the conversation.
Across the border in Portugal, I've learned from Joana Carvalho at DINAMO10 in Viana do Castelo, with 15 years of coworking under her belt, and from Maria, founder of Nowhere Desk in Arcos de Valdevez. Across Europe, I'm constantly energised by Dimitris Manoukas—restlessly curious about everything rural, from youth programmes to refugees to economic development, without ever losing his urgency.
These are the people writing the rural story in real time. Nobody is talking about them.
If you only follow mainstream coworking news, you'd think the economy was intact. Millions flowing. Biggest boom ever. What never gets talked about is the operators holding spaces open in communities that are quietly disappearing—while the industry obsesses over Death Star coworking companies opening in another major city, seamlessly re-imagining neighbourhoods.
In 2015, my friend Neal Gorenflo wrote that platform cooperatives could beat Death Stars.
He was talking about Uber. Nobody applied that thinking to physical space. They should have. Because the Death Star in your neighbourhood doesn't need an algorithm. It needs an address.
Those corporate spaces are hospitable. Brilliantly so. But hospitality isn't the point. The question is whose story you're writing: the consumer's or the citizen's. One serves customers. The other serves communities.
The Arithmetic of Empty Spain
Step into La Selva del Camp, a village of 5,000 people about 100 kilometres south of Barcelona.
In 2008, the economic crisis pushed Jordi Massaguer Pla and his partner, Ana, out of the city. They didn't retreat to a spare bedroom to work in isolation. Ana, an architect, renovated an old family space, and they opened a coworking hub called el Taller Coworking in a town that had never even heard the word. They didn't do it to build a scalable real estate empire; they did it because they needed a professional network.
When they hosted their first event, thirty people showed up.
Villagers who only knew each other as "someone's nephew" or "someone's father" suddenly discovered they were web designers, local printers, and agricultural nut sellers working silently behind closed doors. Jordi and Ana gave them a place to plug in—literally, bringing gigabit internet to the village—and suddenly, a hidden local economy became visible.
The people running spaces like this aren’t corporate "community managers." They are the ones who opened the room, connected the village, and kept the lights on.
Rural decline is an equation.
Let's look at the actual arithmetic. Here in Galicia, we lose approximately 6,000 university graduates between the ages of 25 and 34 every single year. According to the Foro Económico de Galicia and researchers at the University of Vigo, the sunk cost of educating that exported talent bleeds between €178 million and €366 million from this region annually.
That is up to a third of a billion euros of local investment, packed into suitcases and shipped to major cities, every twelve months.
Wealth, like gravity, pulls towards mass. When a system is designed to reward density, it is designed to drain the periphery. For every year a town waits for a fibre-optic cable, for every bus route that is cut, that gap compounds.
España Vaciada: Emptied Spain
In Spain, grassroots movements don't just call it rural decline. They call it España Vaciada. Emptied Spain.
The word "emptied" is an accusation. It means this situation is the result of systemic political choices to extract resources. The Serranía Celtibérica group uses a specific, politically loaded rallying cry for this: demotanasia.
Coined by researcher Pilar Burillo, the word combines the Greek Demos (people) and Thanatos (death without violence). It is demographic euthanasia. It defines exactly what happens when political actions, indirect decisions, or institutional omissions cause the slow, silent disappearance of a territory's population.
They feel they are being actively allowed to die.
So when an operator opens a collaborative space in one of these towns, planting a flag in the concrete and refusing to be euthanised.
Moses-in-Reverse
Look at Edo Sadikovic at Sende. His greatest operational victory was successfully lobbying, fighting, and negotiating with the bureaucracy to bring fibre-optic cables to a remote Galician village 1,000 metres above sea level. He didn't just get faster internet for his members. He built infrastructure for the town.
Robert Moses built low bridges in New York to keep public buses—and the people on them—out. He built exclusion into concrete. Rural coworking operators are doing Moses-in-reverse. They are building inclusion directly into the physical landscape.
But building it is only half the battle. Surviving the village is the other.
The Transplant and the Immune System
Introducing highly mobile, affluent digital nomads into a deeply traditional, struggling rural village is an organ transplant.
The new coworking space is a foreign heart. And the village's entirely legitimate fear of gentrification, extraction, and being treated as a quaint "tourist attraction" is the immune system trying to reject it.
If the operator doesn't actively force integration, you get the "Nomad Bubble."
The bubble is where expatriates speak English, drink coffee, use the local water, and leave without creating a single drop of economic or social reciprocity. It is extractive. And the village will eventually attack it until it shuts down.
The Lisbon Warning
I fear that if rural coworking spaces and people in towns like Vigo don't stay alert, the heart and soul of the town or village will be hollowed out by Airbnb digital nomad fuckwads.
Lisbon looks no different from Silicon Roundabout in London these days; it's Disneyland and it's lost its soul. While a handful of extractive companies congratulate themselves about how prosperous Lisbon is, hardly any Portuguese can afford to live there. It's like an endless stream of supermarket chains opening up in your village and crushing the butcher, greengrocer, and baker to death.
When I first came to Galicia 15 years ago, I felt like I'd come to Spain for the first time in my life. There wasn't even a Starbucks here then—and now there's only one. Hardly any of the menus are in English, and Marmite is £10 a jar. I still haven't found anywhere that sells Carling Black Label and an English breakfast. And I hope it stays that way.
Regenerative Coliving: The Antidote
To survive, and to protect that soul, operators practice "regenerative coliving." This is the strict mandate that remote work must actively heal the host village.
Look at Juan Barbed and the team at Rooral in Andalusia. They pioneered the "No Walls Village." They explicitly reject the gated-compound model. The entire village is the coliving space. Remote workers are pushed out of their comfort zones, expected to buy from the local butcher, participate in local festivals, and drink tea with the elderly residents.
Look at Anceu Coliving here in Galicia.
When they realised their village had a water management issue, their tech workers didn't just complain. Through their Rural Hackers initiative, residents developed the Punto de Agua project—an open-source water meter reading system. That system now serves over 400 local households.
You cease to be the aloof foreigner on a laptop the minute you help fix the town's water supply. You prove your undeniable utility.
The Café Reality and the Dark Side of the Moon
But the friction isn't always hostility. Often, it is a suffocating apathy.
In areas scarred by economic collapse, operators battle "passive citizenship." The locals have endured so much systemic failure that they no longer believe they have any agency. Operators call this the "Café Reality."
Locals will come into the beautiful new coworking space, but they won't work or collaborate. They just drink coffee, argue about local politics, complain about the lack of options, and wait. They suffer from a toxic mindset of "waiting for the great mayor." They believe only the state can fix things, so they do nothing.
The operator has to expend immense emotional energy trying to shake the village awake.
The Dark Side of the Moon
And they do this while completely isolated. In the summer, the rural hub is vibrant. But in the winter, when global mobility drops and the weather turns grey, operators face extreme, echoing loneliness. They are stuck on what they call "the dark side of the moon."
They are the single point of contact for leaky 15th-century roofs, failing internet routers, language disputes, and even guests experiencing mental health crises miles from a hospital.
They are exhausted. They are burning out. And they are largely invisible to the industry they belong to.
The Stage Is Rigged
The industry is not talking about a problem that costs one mid-sized Spanish region up to €366 million a year. Six thousand graduates. Every year. Just from Galicia.
And the conference agenda has a PropTech panel.
Gary Stevenson's argument about mainstream economists isn't that they're bribed into silence. It's worse than that. They come from a class that doesn't need to think about wealth inequality—because it doesn't affect them. Same universities, same dinner tables. Class shapes what questions you think are worth asking.
The coworking industry has the same problem.
Who Gets the Mic
Every time I've seen someone on a conference main stage talking about rural coworking, they've been from a real estate company. Every time I've been in a Barcamp or unconference talking about local economic development, it's been someone whose grandmother owned the building, who came back home to try to reignite something.
(Credit where it's due: the German Coworking Federation and their Barcamp formats are among the few actively keeping this grassroots rural conversation alive, allowing operators to bypass corporate trends entirely.)
But generally? The people with actual skin in the game aren't on the stage. They're in the car park having a cigarette.
The conference agenda isn't rural because the conference is built by and for people with a commercial interest in density. Enterprise contracts. PropTech investment. Bigger spaces, more members. Rural operators don't scale. They don't attract Series A funding. They don't make good case studies for a sponsor deck.
So they get a slot at the unconference. If they're lucky.
I've said this to people who run major coworking conferences—people I respect, people I call friends. I've said it to their faces. Writing it here isn't a betrayal. It's an invitation. You know this is true. So does everyone in the room.
The question is what we do about it.
The Social Coup
Which brings us to European Coworking Day on May 6th.
If you are a rural operator reading this, I know you are tired. When someone tells you to "host a global event," your immediate reaction is that you do not have the bandwidth.
But May 6th is not a marketing exercise. It is a headcount.
It is a strategic tool to rebrand your space to your own village. It is the day you open the doors, host a community meal, screen a film, and visually prove to the locals that you are their civic anchor. You show them you are fighting the demographic collapse right alongside them. You break the Café Reality.
More importantly, it is a political act of visibility.
The 50-Space Coup
If we woke up this Friday morning, and 50 rural coworking spaces in forgotten villages, market towns, and neighbourhoods across Europe had simply put their pin on the map, everyone else would join in.
It would be an absolute social coup.
It proves to the big-city-dominated industry that rural operators are not an anomaly. You are the silent majority. You are a massive, distributed infrastructure network keeping the lights on across the continent.
The Zero-Friction Playbook
You don't need a massive plan. The playbook is zero-friction.
Step 1: Put your pin on the map today. Do not overthink what your event will be. Just claim your space on the board.
Step 2: Figure out the event later. Host a potluck. Declare an open-doors day. Hit play on an ACTionism documentary and set out some chairs.
Pay attention to the villages. The revolution is coming and it will be coworking.
Stand up, and be counted.
📌 Link in the Show Notes: Your Action Plan
Don't wait until you have a perfect plan. Put your space on the map right now, and let the network support you.
- Claim Your Space: European Coworking Day Map/Registration
- The Zero-Friction Event: How to Host an ACTionism Screening for European Coworking Day
- Join the Conversation: European Coworking Assembly - Call - Thursday 9th April 14:00 CET
Get Back To Where You Once Belonged
- Build the Network: Unreasonable Connection ONLINE - April 16th
- Meet in Person: Unreasonable Connection Live - Space4 May 19th
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