Test case
Linz Lab
Linz is an industrial city, a commuter hub and a university town. Here we work through the big questions of this site in one concrete place: what would less work mean for jobs, the city budget, land and how people live together?
Why Linz?
Austria has a special history with the question of what a lack of work does to people: the study 'Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community' (1933) became a world classic, and since 2020 the same village has hosted an internationally noted job-guarantee experiment. Researchers at Johannes Kepler University Linz have also built on this work.
Linz itself is in the middle of change: voestalpine plans to make steel in an electric arc furnace from 2027 – an upheaval that steel towns such as Port Talbot in Wales are living through right now. And the Tabakfabrik shows how a closed industrial plant can become home to hundreds of new jobs. Sources are on the Basics, Instruments and Cities pages.