First off, let me explain the concept of a Rural Coworking Event
In many countries, and Portugal is one of them, it is the cities that light up with bustle. They are places where people for centuries have gathered to live, and where they created facilities to make their living and to make life interesting: market places and business hubs, schools, theatres, restaurants, and a solid infrastructure connecting everything and everybody. In many countries, when people think of seeking their fortune – and making money –, they are drawn to the city. The countryside is traditionally left to fend for itself: it is seen as the place which lags behind, where changes only happen at a slow pace, where tradition and convention take priority over innovation, where infrastructure is lacking or outdated, where the people live who are either rich enough to commute, or too poor to leave. And this may have been true for centuries.
But catch up with the times, will you?
We no longer live in an age where travel is necessarily limited to the painstaking and time-consuming process of physically covering distances, or where education and innovation are necessarily dependent on physical travel to some city’s centre of learning and research and business. For many people, education and innovation and productivity can all be achieved remotely, from whatever distance, thanks to digital infrastructure.
And this is where Rural Coworking Events come in: to create awareness of the modern-day potential of the countryside; and to help rural communities put themselves on the map as completely viable places for business, while offering a life-style which is easier and more affordable than any city can offer these days. In Portugal, these events are organised by Rural Move, a community of change-makers, in cooperation with rural municipalities and chambers of commerce.
At a Rural Coworking Event, business owners, freelancers and employees from inside the country as well as abroad are invited to come work from a rural location for a spell. They experience first hand how they do not need to live in a city, or within travelling distance from the company office, to do their jobs. The rural communities have fully equipped, communal office buildings. During the event, people from the local municipality and chamber of commerce introduce their guest workers to their inhabitants and places of interest. In return, the guest workers provide them with information: what would the municipality need to do and offer in order for their guests to conduct their business properly? What facilities are lacking still? What features are a solid plus? And for guest workers from abroad, how do local governments in your country deal with the abandonment of rural areas? The guest workers work at their job during the day, then participate in social, cultural and commercial events in the evening, and are engaged as guest speakers.
Rural Move 2024: Figeiro dos Vinhos
In May 2024 I participated in such a Rural Coworking Event in Figeiro dos Vinhos, Portugal. I was invited through the European Coworking Assembly by Maria do Ceu Bastos. Now Maria and I have a great deal in common. For one, we are both women, mothers, small business owners and somewhat wayward individuals. We have both made the choice to move to a rural area and work remotely: Maria in Portugal, me in France. We are both interested not only in coworking, but also in coliving. And to top things off: we are both translators.
That is where the similarities stop, though. Because even though translation – as you can imagine – is particularly suited to be done remotely, ‘translation’ is a ridiculously generic term for a profession that takes on so many faces. Maria is a technical translator, and I am a literary translator. Maria’s working languages are mainly Portuguese/ English, mine are are English/ French/ German/ Dutch.
So what, you may say, it’s the business of putting text from one language into another, what’s the relevance here? Well, depending on the work that you do, different business facilities are needed.
Back to the difference between technical and literary translation
The thing any reader likes about a text is that it serves its purpose, and that it, while serving its purpose, gives a feel of consistency.
Technical translation typically deals with product specifications (basically strings of unconnected words), leaflet texts (informative, promotional) and business correspondence. The bursts of concentration and focus required to create consistent business texts are short and, within the context of a coworking event, sweet because feasible.
In literary translation there is no such thing as ‘unconnected words’, and the pages of connected words take months to translate. Inherent to their literary nature, the texts impart their information, their promotion of views and their feel by means of a narrative and through a linguistic beauty and style that is particular to one specific writer – which it is the translator’s job to pick up and re-create in the target language. After doing as much research as is needed to have the meaning clear, literary translation is essentially about tone of voice, and about how to construct each tone by means of words.
In Figeiro, we had a lovely, big, communal office space assigned to us. Lovely as it was, a room full of people, nice as they were, didn’t help in terms of productivity.
Thoughts on commercial, cultural and political aspects
Then there is the commercial side to the event: in Figeiro officers from the municipality and the chamber of commerce had set up wonderfully informative meetings with the locals, townspeople in their private capacity and business owners both, where we discussed what was needed to revive Portuguese rural communities, pointing out the issues and thinking up ways to solve them.
It struck me how, at those occasions, people would point to the national and/or local government to create, for instance, public transport facilities, to create local business hubs, to create… And it made me wonder about private initiatives: cars can be shared, private premises can be converted into low-threshold business hubs, social networks to achieve things can be created.
Of course, in a way it is easy for someone from the Netherlands to criticise: the Netherlands is small and flat, and when all is said and done, it is one great big city with bits of green. In the Netherlands there are distances covered by bike on a daily basis which you wouldn’t dream of covering by bike in Portugal. In the Netherlands the difference in wealth and facilities between cities, towns and rural areas seems much smaller than in Portugal. Another difference between our countries, between our cultures, is that in the Netherlands people seem less inclined to wait for the government to solve problems – this, by the way, may be a case of long-standing disillusionment with governmental effort. One of the big issues in the Netherlands is the ongoing housing crisis, which has propelled ideas of a shared economy, with coworking and coliving as exponents, which in their turn propelled ideas of behavioural practices which best served coworking and coliving communities (the principle of ‘neighbourliness’). Anyway, maybe my outsider’s views have been helpful, I can only hope so.
Perhaps most important
And then… there is the social side to the event, with unsurpassed hospitality, formal and informal dinner parties where people sat down for hours of engaged conversation and fun, guided tours of the town’s museums and flourishing art, and trips into areas of breathtaking natural beauty. The spirit of collaboration, people’s kindness and interest, the many different professions that each provided angles of their own, all of these made the week-long event of Figeiro unforgettably marvellous.
If I were to give my two cents on what would make a coworking event experience even more wonderful than this one has been, it would be to have someone assigned to study the guest list and perhaps reach out to guests in preparation of the event, in order to introduce them to local (business) people who would be of particular interest to them. In order for people to actually move their businesses to areas that are less of an obvious choice, however beautiful and however welcoming, they need to know their field of interest is alive, and there will be people they can connect with professionally.