Felix Fritsch
Watch the livestreamFelix opens by admitting the surreal fact that Valley is finally happening. The vision was first voiced three years ago: an eco-village here, permanent structures for living and production. The Commons Hub itself grew from a 2020 first event and the 2021 Crypto Commons Gathering into years of programming. Valley is the step from a rented events business toward common ownership of the valley itself.
The setting is load-bearing, not scenery. The Hirschwangerhof was an inn for 150 years beside a factory that shrank from over 2,000 workers to under 100. Land is lead-poisoned from a 19th-century battery works, and over 80% of housing was factory-owned and demolished. Some 200 people remain, average age above 70. The valley shows how economic processes scar the earth, and offers cheap real estate for rebuilding.
Felix names a historical opening: an old order failing, a new one not yet formed, under converging pressures of a multipolar world, climate crisis, and the end of cheap nature. For two decades commoners refined theory on shared resources, rights, and rules, but lacked practice and integrated systems. Housing and production are his two chokepoints for extraction. Building them as commons would open space for experiments without capital's full pressure.
The program moves in sequence. Week one, Return of the Commons, opens with Michel Bauwens' visionary framing, then Adam Arvidsson's more critical, pragmatic account. Week two turns to cosmo-local production and its revenue potential. Week three addresses future living in community, both social and architectural, renegotiating public, common, and private space. Week four focuses on governance and funding to reach a first concrete case study.
The aim is not isolated intentional communities but a network. Prior waves exist: the Global Ecovillage Network, network states and nations. Felix's crew wants to take stock of what worked and grow a federation of locally rooted, globally connected hubs, the cosmo-local vision where light knowledge travels and heavy production stays local. He and Jeff Emmett set out this 'monasteries of the twenty-first century' argument on Bauwens' newsletter.
Felix closes on politics. He calls the Hub a group of post-leftists who still carry leftist values but are frustrated with conventional politics, so they build rather than petition. The month is an explicit experiment with no blueprint, expecting contradictions and failures. The end goal is real: refined association statutes, a functioning legal body, and a property to plan in detail. The future is built through places and experiments.