"What a fascinating prospect for young people to grow into a healthier world right from the start, with solid social embedding, allowing them to develop their individual potential, always with a view to the overall context on this planet."
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A farmstead. A think tank. A work in progress.
In late autumn 2020, an old three-sided farmstead in Anhalt, Eastern Germany — dating back to 1884 — was given a second life. What began as a renovation became something larger: a space for rethinking how we learn, work, and live together.
The buildings are being restored. The land is being cultivated. Ideas are being tested — about community, self-directed learning, meaningful labor, and what it means to take responsibility for the places we inhabit.
This is not a finished project. It is a field journal of a transformation still underway.
The Idea
Modern life fragments us. Work alienates. Schools confine. Communities dissolve. The welfare state absorbs consequences but cannot address causes.
What if people came together — roofers and philosophers, carpenters and educators — to build something different? What if abandoned farms and vacant properties became living laboratories for a more integrated way of being?
The intellectual framework draws from communitarianism, the commons, unconditional basic income, experiential education, and ecological transformation. But the real work happens with hands and tools, in barns and gardens, across seasons.
The Place
One hour southwest of Berlin, in a region shaped by both Wilhelmine ambition and GDR collectivism, the farmstead sits among small villages, abandoned dairies, and open fields.
A barn that once held hay now hosts seminars and discussions. A workshop cleaned of decades of debris is being reimagined for craft and production. The stable building is undergoing a major reconstruction into a seminar center with guest rooms. Fruit trees are bearing again.
What Lives Here
This site holds the threads of the project as it develops:
- The Place — buildings, land, gardens, the animals and trees
- Ideas — transformation theory, civil society, self-directed learning
- Publications — the books, the article, the research
- Journal — a chronological record, season by season
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Based on the research and practice of Joachim Bröcher.
Published in Frontiers in Sociology and documented across four volumes.