EU Digital Regions

There’s an idea that’s been going around in my head, about how rural-ish areas in Europe could/should invest in infrastructure for digitial service companies. How this could be a great way to provide a boost to regions that are currently struggling economically, and could be a blueprint in general to promote a widespread network of small and midsized European tech companies, as well as stimulate hiring across borders. I was going to write about it on Mastodon, but once I did a braindump it looked more like a blogpost, so here you go!

Take where I am, the Hageland region in Flanders, Belgium. A cluster of a dozen or so towns, each 10k~35k in population, sitting in between the bigger college cities of Leuven and Hasselt, with Brussels and Antwerp as bigger cities less than an hour away. You don’t see a lot of tech companies in places like these, presumably because it’s hard to find sufficient talent in these small towns. But together there are ~200k people here, similar to a small to mid-sized European city.

Most people here with white collar jobs commute into the cities, either by car or train. There’s a lot of empty real estate in the city centers, partly due to the rise of e-commerce and the demise of brick-and-mortar stores. During the day the main people you see in these city centers are school age children, or retirees.

What I imagine these towns could do is rent/buy some of this central real estate, and turn them into digital service hubs. Offer coworking services, office space, and meeting rooms, to individuals and companies, especially for people and companies in tech. Make this a network, so membership gets you access to all locations in the wider region. Look for spaces that are easily reachable by public transport. This allows for a number of different constellations. Individuals who combine working from home with working at the coworking space. Companies who have a central office in one of the hubs, but employees coming from a little further afield can work in some of the other hubs some of the days. Companies that are fully remote, but can still use the hubs to get together and make use of the meeting rooms.

On top of this, this network could offer Employee of Record services, making it easier and more attractive for foreign companies to hire people here. Now individuals in tech working for foreign companies will usually become self-employed, but this is not attractive for everyone, as it provides fewer social protections, and it potentially means a decrease in tax revenue for the towns.

In the evening these spaces could be used for local community events like meetups. They could also host things like makerspaces, or organize workshops, thus giving an opportunity for talented young people to organically come into contact with professionals and companies in their area.

Developing such a network would have several second order benefits. It would bring more working age people into the town centers during the day, which is good for hospitality and retail businesses. It brings work back from the cities, thus raising tax revenue. Allowing people to get jobs closer to home cuts back their commutes, which gives them more flexibility and higher quality of life, and helps to reach climate goals.

This is an idea that’s been going around in my head for a while now. Now I’m curious what you think. Are there regions in Europe that are already doing this, or something similar? Are there others talking about and promoting similar ideas? What are all the ways in which this would never work? Or what are the particulars that would help this succeed? Can/should this be fully public, or should it be a public-private partnership? Let me know on the fediverse, or use the hashtag #eudigitalregions.