Goodbye big city: Berlin family lives in the Ore Mountains on trial

From the hustle and bustle of the big city to the rural Ore Mountains: a family of three swapped where they live and work for just under a month. Instead of Berlin, they are living in the mountain town of Zwönitz with its 11,300 inhabitants - on a trial basis. There were 270 applications for the experiment, says Daniel Schalling from Regionalmanagement Erzgebirge. Most of them came from large cities such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main.

"We want to show what the Ore Mountains have to offer, how liveable the Ore Mountains are," explains Schalling. The aim is to give a new perspective on the region and to infect other people with surprising and inspiring impressions. But will the participants actually pack their bags at the end and decide to live in the Ore Mountains? "That would be perfect, but it's not our primary goal."

Working remotely

Philipp Jäger is certainly impressed. He came to Saxony at the beginning of the month with his wife Katharina and daughter Romy. While their eleven-month-old daughter is looked after by a childminder, the parents work remotely in a coworking office - he in a digital agency, she in the events industry, says Jäger. They use the rest of their time to get to know the country and its people. They have already been to Oberwiesenthal, visited a company and taken a sightseeing flight.

"It's very scenic here," says Jäger, who doesn't shy away from the mountainous surroundings on his racing bike. "We like to travel a lot. This is a good opportunity for us to get to know a region in Germany." Because he had never been to the Erzgebirge before. Could he and his family settle here in the long term? "After ten years in Berlin, we can imagine pretty much anything from Brandenburg to Dubai."

Other municipalities also offer trial living

Trial living is now available in a number of cities. Guben and Eisenhüttenstadt in Brandenburg, for example, offer such trial offers - in the hope of finding new residents in the face of demographic change. In Guben, interested parties are provided with furnished guest apartments for two to four weeks, weekly get-togethers are organized and internships in companies are arranged on request. According to the city, 31 people took advantage of this last year; this year, the number of participants is expected to be similar.

The city of Görlitz has a very long history of offering trial accommodation. The beginnings date back to 2008. The original idea was to attract residents from the outskirts of the city to the center due to vacancies, as Robert Knippschild explains. He heads the Interdisciplinary Center for Transformative Urban Conversion at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development. The researchers are providing scientific support for the trial living in Görlitz.

Görlitz: Every tenth trial resident has stayed

The program was later geared towards people moving in from outside, but is now reserved for employees of the new research center for astrophysics. Knippschild knows that such a move does not automatically mean that employees will actually move to the city. Interested parties can now live in Görlitz for three months on a trial basis. According to the information provided, 18 people have taken advantage of this in the current run.

In total, almost 270 people have lived in the city on a trial basis since the start of the project, with around one in ten ultimately settling there, as Knippschild explains. "These are the ones we know about." The actual number could well be higher.

"The project is not so much about getting new residents into the city en masse," emphasizes the scientist. Rather, it is also about finding out what expectations people have of life in such a medium-sized city, where they come from, what experiences they have of life here and to what extent this differs from their expectations. From this, conclusions could be drawn for urban development and infrastructure.