Julia Paaß

Empty schools, churches, and farm buildings are not just rural real estate; they are the infrastructure which once provided rural communities with spaces for encounter, identity, and belonging. With Netzwerk Zukunftsorte, Julia Paaß is re-framing vacant rural buildings as resources: creating new norms and standards for their revitalization as “Future Places” with open, measurable criteria, setting up founders to succeed in developing places that serve the common good, and equipping municipalities to allocate property by civic value rather than the highest bid. In doing so, Julia builds the conditions for a new model of rural development that is community-led, financially sustainable, replicable, and democracy-strengthening.

There’s an abundance of vacant spaces in the German countryside, particularly in the formerly Eastern sector where Julia’s work began—former schools, churches, industrial buildings, village pubs or train station - places that once formed the backbone of community identity and social cohesion. These buildings are often seen as a burden by municipalities and a symbol of decay by rural residents who feel left behind. Julia sees them as opportunities to rebuild social fabric outside of cities. Julia’s insight is that, while these places will eventually be used again, without shared standards and common language, rural revitalization is random: left to chance, political opportunism, market dynamics, individual idealists, or developers. With Netzwerk Zukunftsorte, she creates, for the first time, a systematic method for developing vacant rural properties for the common good, with a clear set of criteria and methods for how to implement them. Julia's vision is to bring these buildings back—but built for the future: revived not as nostalgic replicas but as the new civic infrastructure of democratic rural life.

Three years after Julia moved from Berlin to the small village of Prädikow, she helped secure and restore a large, vacant estate in the middle of the village – the ruins of what used to operate as a farm, brick factory and destillery, and used to employ most of the village residents—after years of neglectful management and market speculation. There, she learned to navigate heritage constraints, complex ownership models, and the deep cultural differences between urban arrivals and local residents—while also assembling funding mosaics and inventing new governance structures. It was during this process that Julia realized that failure to replace rural decline is not primarily caused by a lack of people or ideas, but by the lack of a support system that helps communities navigate complex, bureaucratic processes, secure the needed material support, and develop their projects for the benefit of all residents. Through this insight, the idea for Netzwerk Zukunftsorte was born – and developed with her co-founder Philipp Hentschel.

At the core of Julia’s innovation is the creation of the “Zukunftsort” (Future Place) as a defined, open-source, shared standard based on criteria that are both precise, adaptable, and legible. A Future Place must revitalize a vacant building; have founders living on-site or nearby as primary residents; combine living and working locally; and create open meeting points—so-called “third places”—used by the wider community. These criteria have been expanded into a broader set of impact dimensions, with indicators that allow comparison and learning across sites. This framing serves a dual purpose: it gives founders a common identity and language for work that is otherwise fragmented and hard to legitimize, and it gives municipalities and funders a decision framework that can justify allocating property and resources based on civic value, not simply on the highest bid. Allied networks are invited to adopt and adapt Zukunftsorte’s common standards in a coalition of practice.

Netzwerk Zukunftsorte builds a new kind of institutional infrastructure operating on three levels. For founders, it offers an open-access knowledge platform, peer exchange, meetups, and advisory support across the typical phases of a project—imagining, funding, build-up and operation—so teams can access the right expertise when they face inevitable questions with cooperative governance, funding, or integration conflicts. For municipalities and property owners, it runs education and vacancy-matching formats and promotes community-oriented property allocation (“Konzeptvergabe”), turning local administrations from a conventional stance of distress-property sellers into active stewards of social infrastructure. For the policy system, it makes successful models visible to state and federal actors and advocates for land policies and funding frameworks that can handle hybrid, common-good projects—an approach already reflected in how the “Zukunftsort” terminology has begun to appear in strategies, studies, and programs.

The model is designed to scale while protecting its social contract. New members enter as “startup” Future Places and only become fully recognized once they meet a defined threshold of criteria; just as importantly, attitude and behavior toward long-standing rural community members is formalized to prevent gentrification dynamics. This emphasis on standards and behavior is not cosmetic; vacant buildings are increasingly contested spaces, and whoever creates the places where people gather also shapes the politics of belonging. By making the Future Place a replicable, quality-assured standard—and by equipping both civic pioneers and municipalities to act on it—Zukunftsorte turns common-good oriented rural renewal from isolated hero projects into a field with shared rules, shared tools, and a credible growth path across Germany and beyond.

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.

In Brandenburg alone, the number of village pubs (Dorfgaststätten) fell from 437 to 295 between 2010 and 2023; in North Rhine–Westphalia, nearly half of all pub owners have closed over the past two decades. 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. Structural barriers to participation—identified nationally as multiple thresholds that disproportionately affect low-income residents, migrants, and rural populations—become harder to overcome without physical venues for engagement.

Germany’s growth-oriented economic logic concentrates capital, infrastructure, and opportunity in urban centers. In the East, the shock after reunification further added a force of deindustrialization: it collapsed rural labor markets, driving sustained out-migration of young and educated residents. East Germany has lost around 2.3 million residents since reunification (from about 15.3 million to 12.5 million), and the eastern population is projected to fall a further 2% by 2030 even as the West continues to grow. As the population 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 social value of open village space doesn’t appear on a balance sheet. Market dynamics and municipal practice frequently deepen the problem. Where rural properties do attract interest, communities often find themselves bidding against profit-driven investors who can pay more and can wait longer for returns. Even highly motivated local actors cannot compete when land is allocated on price alone. Municipalities often lack resources, frameworks, or political incentives to prioritize community-oriented redevelopment over highest-bidder transactions, nor have experience in considering otherwise. As a result, the people who could help reverse decline lack workable pathways to establishing or replicating alternatives.

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.

The political consequences are no longer abstract. In the 2024 state elections, the far-right party AfD became the strongest party in Thuringia (32.8%), Saxony (30.6%), and Brandenburg (29.2), and across the 2024 national elections, nearly half the electorate of Eastern Germany voted for the AfD or BSW. 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.

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.

So far, no single rural development actor, network, or project has tackled this issue holistically and with a shared framework. Renewal requires an operating system that lets very different actors—founders, municipalities, property owners, banks, foundations, ministries—coordinate around the same definition of “success.” 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.

In this context, Julia positions Netzwerk Zukunftsorte not as a conventional developer, but as a connector and translator that makes community-led projects credible and repeatable. Julia’s strategy consists of three parts: first, building the infrastructure for project founders with the Zukunftsort criteria at its core; second, shifting municipal culture and practice for property valuing and allocation; and third, policy integration and field building for common-good oriented rural development.

The first strategic lever targets founders and collectives revitalizing vacant spaces in structurally weak regions, supporting them to overcome obstacles to success and giving them tools, resources and incentives to develop their property for the common good. The two mutually reinforcing parts of this strategy consist in both identifying those founders and places that are aligned with the vision of Netzwerk Zukunftsorte and giving them the Future Place designation based on a set of criteria, as well as creating a peer learning ecosystem where both current and potential Future Places can learn, exchange and support each other.

The backbone of this operating system is the Zukunftsort criteria—an explicit, measurable standard for common-good, place-based development in structurally weaker rural regions. The criteria begin with two non-negotiables: the site must be in a rural and/or structurally weak area, and it must repurpose existing buildings or brownfields rather than consuming new land. On top sit seven impact dimensions, of which at least five must be met, spanning housing, work, regional future-readiness, open meeting points and programming, climate and nature protection, democracy and social cohesion, and governance structures for the common good (such as cooperatives, land trusts, or syndicate-like rental models). What makes this more than a value statement is the indicator level: projects report concrete data—rents compared to local benchmarks, number of subsidized units, jobs and coworking infrastructure created, numbers of participatory formats created, documented integration events, and evidence of impact logic and measurement. The data is returned to the project for planning, but it also informs guidance for the Netzwerk Zukunftsorte and gives municipalities and funders a legible basis for backing unconventional, community-owned development.

Because standards only matter if they are enforced, Zukunftsorte is designed as a quality-assured field rather than a loose movement. Places enter in stages—often as “startup” Future Places while they build toward the threshold—and are reviewed through annual check-ins, site visits, and jury decisions, including the option of moving backward if progress stalls. Crucially, Julia formalizes the hardest part of rural renewal: the social contract between newcomers and long-rooted residents. Having “the right attitude” is tested through a probationary period and then codified through commitments that include co-creation with local communities and support for others in the network. This is one way Zukunftsorte reduces the gentrification by urban groups arriving with a savior mindset, raising costs, and withdrawing into private circles.

Hand in hand with the criteria, Julia builds infrastructure that connects isolated pioneers through a learning ecosystem. The open-access knowledge platform wissen.zukunftsorte.land, developed with her co-founder Philipp Hentschel, aggregates lessons from the network’s projects, including uncomfortable ones: how a founding team can lose social inclusion when construction costs spiral, how cooperative structures and concept-based allocation arguments can secure a property against profit-driven competitors, and how to present to a building committee in a way that can win over skeptical conservative representatives. In virtual and in-person meetups, founders exchange tactics, practical and governance formats that typically take years to discover. Through mediated peer support, they also reduce burnout among founders, helping them through the long, exhausting “build-up” phase where renovation and community integration must progress at the same time.

As the work matures, Julia has added a professional advisory layer to the peer infrastructure. In fall 2026, Netzwerk Zukunftsorte launches a learning and consulting platform called “Zukunftsorte Lab”. Funded with €565K by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, built with partners including Social Impact GmbH, CoworkLand, and the architectural firm Denkmal Regenerativ. The platform functions as marketplace for knowledge and consulting around the development and operation of common-good places all over the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). It gathers experienced future place founders as well as well known experts from the field of real estate development for the common good, as well as organizational and financial consultancy and matches their expertise with startup founders in need. They profit via live webinars, online courses and individual consultancy.
Each Future Place must ultimately stand on its own finances—but the advisory elements help lower the knowledge barrier that keeps most groups from becoming economically viable. In practice, this means helping founders choose an ownership and governance model that fits their context, including guidance to a financing mix of grants, loans, and operational revenues, as well as assembling the right expert support for heritage constraints and permitting. Julia’s own track record—mobilizing roughly €1M[1.1] for the development of the „Village Barn“ on Hof Prädikow and helping establish complex cooperative ownership structures—helps to opens doors for less experienced founders.

The second strategic lever targets the municipal and property-owner side of the market. Most rural administrations have never considered vacancy as valuable community infrastructure, nor are they informed about alternatives, so disused buildings are often sold to the highest bidder. Zukunftsorte teaches community-oriented real estate development and equips administrations with tools for Konzeptvergabe—concept-based property allocation that prioritizes democratic, ecological, and cultural value (what Julia calls the “social interest”) over price alone. In the small town of Angermünde, this approach went beyond a workshop: Julia’s team facilitated a municipal mission statement adopted by the city council that legally obligates the administration to prioritize community-oriented development. The deeper effect is cultural as much as procedural—municipalities describe gaining an external lens on what they can already do, and what they could do differently, without having to invent the model themselves. To keep this practice of “good municipalities,“ Netzwerk Zukunftsorte has created the „Starke Orte Netzwerk“ among municipal actors for peer learning and to reduce the political risk of being the first mover; it equips administrations to copy workable formats rather than negotiate them from scratch. In parallel, the Coordination Hub Brandenburg pilot demonstrates a regional product: an intermediary that connects civil society projects, local administrations, state agencies, and landowners so that vacancy activation for the common good does not depend on one heroic mayor or one unusually connected founder.

A third strategic lever is policy and field-building: making the Zukunftsort standard hard to ignore by embedding it into the language of ministries, funding programs, and land policy debates. Julia does this with pragmatic distribution tactics. The Zukunftsorte Team produces manuals and publications with actionable steps and models that municipalities can implement immediately—rather than only asking them to “value community”—and she pairs that with sustained political dialogue at state and federal levels. The network has produced more than 10 publications, including a Federal Ministry of Urban Development research report, and it plans extensive public speaking in 2026 to normalize the model among decision-makers. Because the criteria are openly licensed, Julia invites adoption by allied networks as a deliberate scaling mechanism, encouraging organic uptake by actors without requiring any formal affiliation. This logic also underpins Julia’s push for alliances among adjacent national actors—coworking networks, socially oriented real-estate advocates, cultural space organizations—so they can align indicators, coordinate funding asks, and move faster in the same contested building landscape.

The traction to date suggests that this multi-level architecture is already changing behavior. As of early 2026, Netzwerk Zukunftsorte lists 80+ certified Future Places1 on its map, has 700+ network members, and has run 100+ digital meetups; the broader communications reach exceeds 8,000 via social media and newsletter channels. Outcomes are visible at several system layers: Angermünde’s binding mission statement shows that municipal practice can be rewritten; “Zukunftsort” terminology has entered Brandenburg’s digitalization strategy and federal policy frameworks for rural development, indicating institutional adoption; and peer cascades show replication through credibility: several projects that credit the framework for succeeding in local development-plan changes, such as the Future Place “Wir Bauen Zukunft,” which used the network terminology and argumentation at a municipal council meeting and was able to get its plans approved, also by the more conservative council members. Stephen Willinger, a representative of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, endorsed the Future Places approach, stating, “Future Places serve as models for community-oriented development in municipalities of all sizes because they proactively address the initially daunting changes, courageously and intelligently seek partners, and thereby bring places to life in diverse ways—by experimenting with new forms of coexistence.” Even downstream effects—like a municipal Smart Village app, enabled by one of the networks’ founding Future Places, Coconat, which then spread to 40+ municipalities—signal that the network’s role is increasingly that of a standards-setter whose label enhances visibility and facilitates the creation of innovation clusters in rural areas.

Looking forward, Julia’s scaling plan is explicit about both ambition and constraints. Vision 2030 targets 1,000 certified common-good Places across the German-speaking region, with at least five in every German state by 2027, and an English-language translation planned for 2026–27 alongside EU applications for a broader “Impact Places” umbrella standard. Replication is designed to be low-friction: criteria and tools are open source, the Coordination Hub model is built to be licensed to other states once validated, and NZO Labs is intended to become financially self-sustaining via platform commissions by 2028. At the same time, the plan is intentionally paced by quality controls and community buy-in; this work cannot be scaled like a purely commercial platform without losing legitimacy. Julia is also clear-eyed about capacity: as Zukunftsorte enters a new phase, complementary expertise in real-estate execution and sales will strengthen the model’s ability to convert standards and evidence into faster uptake—especially in a landscape where Julia has described political will for this work as being in greater supply than funding, and far-right actors also understand that the fight for democracy often starts with who controls the buildings where people belong.

Julia Paaß's work is rooted less in a single professional epiphany than in a childhood pattern: being visibly present in a place where you are not fully welcome. She grew up in a small village near Bonn as the child of academic newcomers—people who had arrived with education and ambition, but without the invisible inheritance of local belonging. When bullying and social exclusion intensified at secondary school, Julia did not respond by retreating into a private world. Instead, she developed a kind of alertness to who is being pushed out of the room and why, and a stubborn impulse to build the connections that others withhold. Years later, she would describe the long arc of her life in Prädikow as giving her something she had missed early on: the confidence that comes from knowing how belonging is made—through repeated, ordinary encounters that allow people to recognize each other as legitimate participants in a shared place.

Design became her first language for acting on this impulse. At the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf (1998) she learned how environments steer behavior, attention, and power—but she also discovered what she did not want to do with that knowledge. Advertising felt like a refined form of persuasion. Her graduation project, a fictional "Action Group for the Rescue of Aesthetics," staged interventions that veiled over-produced commercial spaces and redirected attention to vacant buildings, backyards, and overlooked gaps in the urban fabric—an aesthetic critique, but also a social one: the empty and the ordinary were not failures to be hidden, but potential that could be claimed. A decade of freelance design work for museums, followed by a Social Design master's in Zurich focused on participatory methods, and an early community project in Berlin in 2008—where she first experienced what happens when previously unconnected local actors are brought into the same process—gradually pushed her away from shaping surfaces and toward shaping the conditions under which people can decide together.

That conviction was tested when she moved in 2013 to the eastern German village of Prädikow—partly for family reasons, partly for the promise of nature and a different rhythm of life. She arrived with the honest assumption that relocation would bring integration. It did not. Belonging had to be built deliberately, and she built it through practical roles: reviving the village newspaper to learn the local stories and make herself useful; showing up to rituals like the Easter bonfire; becoming an advocate rather than an observer. When the large estate next door came up for sale in 2016, she became the driving force behind turning it into Hof Prädikow, a cooperative place to live and work. But her insistence from the beginning was social, not architectural: it could not become an enclave of newcomers. It had to be porous to the village, structured for everyday mixing, and designed so that long-rooted residents had reasons to enter without feeling judged or displaced. The Dorfscheune Prädikow—the big barn—built with fellow residents and opened in 2021 after intense work through the Covid pandemic—made that logic tangible: a barn that holds coworking and café life alongside council meetings, a choir, children's courses, and the mundane repair-and-build tasks through which trust often forms faster than through debate. It also became the setting for the Dorfakademie, a local institute where all the residents give classes for each other that reflect skills from technology to jam making.

What marks Julia as an entrepreneur is the repeatable pattern behind these choices: she treats social cohesion as something that must be engineered with the same seriousness as financing or permits, and she has the patience to do the unglamorous intermediating that makes complex projects executable. At Hof Prädikow she learned to navigate heritage constraints, skeptical municipal councils, and the deep cultural friction between urban arrivals and rural continuity—while also assembling governance structures and funding mosaics. Rather than performing expertise in every domain, she works by finding the right people and translating between them: residents and administrators, foundations and cooperatives, idealists and pragmatists. That translator role demands credibility, and she has earned it in a field where trust is currency: she is widely experienced as intrinsically motivated and dependable, choosing a harder path despite easier career options. At the same time, she is unsentimental about the political stakes of place: she has learned to reduce polarization not primarily by arguing, but by inviting skeptics into shared, concrete activities where status and ideology matter less than showing up. And because she knows the work exhausts even committed founders, she institutionalizes care as strategy—through regular peer gatherings and by actively distributing decision-making so that the team's capacity, and not only her own stamina, can carry the work forward.