Episode Summary

“When there is such a place in a peripheral area, it’s usually a place that a young person will visit one way or another. You can reach out to them. You can walk around the neighbourhood because we’re talking about small communities, so you know each other.”

Dimitris is a PhD researcher at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Research Fellow at Politécnico di Milano for the Remaking Horizon project on remote working policies, project lead for Rural Radicals, collaborator on EU and EEA-funded initiatives like ResMove and Cowork4YOUTH.

He’s a storyteller who changed his medium from literature to community infrastructure. His entire professional life reads as a search for a new, more empowering narrative for the people and places left behind by Europe’s dominant economic story.

He grew up in Greece’s intellectual centres—Thessaloniki and Athens—but now turns his focus to the periphery. The forgotten villages. The declining market towns. The suburbs where the last young person left decades ago.

He’s translating the language of the urban core and applying it to heartlands that desperately need new economic models.

The problem is stark: across Spain, France, Greece, and beyond, entire regions are being drained of their young talent. Not a trickle, but a haemorrhage.

The brightest minds pack bags and board planes from regional airports, heading for Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, and London.

The term “brain drain” sounds clinical. But behind every statistic is a family losing a daughter, a village losing its future, a local economy losing the one person who might have started something new.

Dimitris isn’t just researching this crisis. He’s building the infrastructure to reverse it. His work poses a provocative question: what if coworking spaces are more than just remote work and good Wi-Fi?

What if they’re actually civic infrastructure—the new town squares where young people practise economic citizenship, where migrants find pathways to entrepreneurship, where peripheral communities discover they don’t need to move to the capital to build meaningful work?

This conversation explores how collaborative spaces can become mediators, bringing together digital opportunities, community networks, and practical skills training.

Bernie and Dimitris discuss everything from the cost-of-living crisis pushing people back to smaller towns, to the specific challenges facing Greece’s social enterprise sector, to why youth retention requires more than sporadic events—it demands organised, sustained policy that connects bottom-up needs with top-down support.

This episode matters because it challenges the narrative that economic opportunity only exists in major cities. For independent coworking operators, this masterclass helps you understand your role not just as a business owner, but as a community anchor.

For anyone working in peripheral regions, it’s proof that brain gain is possible when you build the proper infrastructure for connection, learning, and economic agency.

⏱ Timeline Highlights

[01:24 ] Dimitris introduces himself: PhD researcher studying youth engagement and employment policies in collaborative workspaces across peripheral Europe

[04:04 ] Bernie asks the sleep question—when does Dimitris rest with so many projects spinning simultaneously?

[06:45 ] “Peripheral doesn’t just mean rural—it can be a left-behind suburb or an old warehouse area inside a city”

[09:05 ] “Building your network is one of the hardest things young people need to do. The opportunities to build your network are very, very small nowadays.”

[12:23 ] The economic reality: young people move from Vigo to Barcelona and Madrid, taking their wealth with them—coworking spaces can anchor people locally

[16:00 ] “The cost-of-living crisis discourages young people from staying longer in big cities”

[17:51 ] “Many old institutions, like community centres, adopt coworking practices and rebrand themselves as hubs”

[18:04 ] Bernie asks about Dimitris’s ideal hub—the mental picture he carries

[20:19 ] “It’s really nice, in Greek, we say to listen to a good word, to a nice word every day when you go.”

[22:00 ] Where to find Dimitris: LinkedIn is the central hub for all his projects and deliverables

[24:01 ] Bernie’s closing: host a screening of the Actionism film in your coworking space to kickstart community conversations about collective action

The Peripheral Economy Problem

The language matters here. Dimitris doesn’t say “rural decline” like it’s inevitable. He says “peripheral areas” because geography isn’t the only factor. You can be peripheral in the heart of a city—an old industrial quarter where the factories closed, where services dried up, where nobody opens new businesses anymore.

These areas share common symptoms: population loss, ageing demographics, limited job opportunities, poor digital infrastructure, and a persistent sense of being left behind. The social and economic isolation feeds on itself. When young people leave, they take energy, ideas, purchasing power, and hope with them.

This isn’t just about losing workers. It’s about losing the social fabric. When the young leave, community organisations lose volunteers. Local businesses lose customers. Schools close. The remaining residents age in place, and the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

Dimitris has spent years interviewing young people across Europe who are beneficiaries of employment and engagement initiatives run through collaborative spaces. What he’s discovered challenges the fatalistic narrative that these places are doomed.

The pattern he’s documenting suggests that with the proper infrastructure—both digital and social—peripheral regions can offer something cities increasingly can’t: affordability, community, and quality of life.

The pandemic proved this wasn’t just a theory. During lockdowns, knowledge workers fled expensive city centres for countryside cottages and coastal towns.

Some stayed. The question now is whether communities can build the right conditions to make staying attractive, not just temporarily tolerable.

Youth Engagement as Community Infrastructure

Dimitris describes a methodology that works: use collaborative spaces as the physical anchor for youth engagement, then build programming around what young people need.

First step: stop waiting for them to find you. Walk around the neighbourhood. In small communities, you know each other. Do customer research—ask young people what events they’d actually attend, what skills they want to learn, what barriers they face.

Then bring them into the space with other like-minded peers, some professionals, maybe policymakers, depending on the event. The magic isn’t in the formal programming—it’s in the informal networks that form when people start showing up regularly.

Someone mentions they need help with graphic design. Another person knows someone. A conversation leads to a collaboration. A collaboration leads to paid work.

Dimitris is careful to distinguish between engagement and employment. Engagement is the umbrella term—getting people out of isolation, connecting them to community, giving them a place to belong.

Employment is one of the direct or indirect effects of engagement. You can’t force job creation, but you can create the conditions where economic opportunity becomes more likely.

The spaces that succeed with youth retention share standard practices: they offer skills workshops on remote work, business setup, and digital tools. They host regular social events that aren’t explicitly about work.

They maintain a visible presence in the community rather than expecting everyone to find them online. And critically, they work with—not against—young people’s desire for meaningful work that doesn’t require leaving home.

What this conversation doesn’t capture is the toll. The grant applications that fail. The community members who leave anyway. The quiet moments when building this infrastructure feel like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon.

Dimitris carries this work across multiple countries whilst the economic ground keeps shifting beneath everyone’s feet. For the exhausted UK operator listening to this, that tension between vision and viability isn’t abstract—it’s Tuesday afternoon.

The Digital Opportunity (and Its Economic Reality)

The cost-of-living crisis is reshaping where people can afford to live. Dimitris sees this as a convergence point: cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable, while remote work is becoming increasingly viable.

For the first time in generations, young people don’t automatically need to move to the capital to access knowledge economy jobs.

But let’s be clear about the economics. Remote work solves the income problem only if you already have clients, skills, and savings.

For local youth without university degrees or professional networks, “learn to code” isn’t a magic wand. Digital skills matter, but so does access to the networks that generate paid work in the first place.

Bernie often talks about how the middle class is being hollowed out, and coworking should wake up and pay attention before coworking becomes a privilege.

If peripheral spaces are to anchor economic opportunity, they must be affordable for local wage earners, not just for remote workers who bring London salaries to Greek villages.

The coworking space acts as a mediator, bringing all the threads together. It has the physical space, the people who run it with knowledge and networks,