The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of physical hubs, education hubs, third spaces and regional precincts.
Physical hubs, third spaces, and regional precincts provide built infrastructure through which other community interventions can be housed, delivered, and sustained. They range from single-room coworking spaces in remote towns to government-planned industrial precincts. At the community scale, regional coworking spaces and innovation hubs serve as third places – neither home nor traditional workplace – that address the professional isolation experienced by remote workers, sole traders, and micro-enterprises in small towns as well as remote offices for larger corporates.
Australian examples range from CoWs Near The Coast in Bega (opened 2014 as an experiment in building a software engineering industry in a rural town), to CoHoots in Castlemaine (where the founder describes community, not coworking, as the core product), the Goondiwindi Business Hub in southern Queensland (where four of eight tenants are satellite offices for larger companies, including international firms), The Generator coworking spaces in Bundaberg and Gympie (operated by Regional Business HQ), and Upstairs in Bathurst (the Central West’s first regional startup hub, founded in 2018 as a partnership between the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst Regional Council, and the local business community). Spacecubed in Western Australia has extended its metropolitan coworking and accelerator model into regional support through its Meshpoints network and regional enabler programs. Regional hubs function as community infrastructure as well as commercial real estate in hosting events, brokering introductions, providing business support, and creating social fabric that keeps people connected to place.
Another category is the education hub, such as that anchored by the Country Universities Centre (CUC) network. The CUC is a a place-based initiative founded in Cooma in 2013 that has since expanded to 28 centres. Each Centre is owned and run by a local skills-based volunteer board that chooses to affiliate with the CUC network, providing face-to-face academic and wellbeing support for students studying online at any Australian university or provider. The model is institutionally agnostic – at CUC Cape York in Cooktown, 60 students study at 27 different universities across 48 unique degrees in a town of 2,800 people. The CUC sits within the broader Regional University Study Hubs program, to which the Australian Government has committed over $180 million since 2018, now funding 56 hubs nationally. These hubs function as community anchors that support young people and career-changers in their towns, can address workforce pipeline gaps for local industries, and create a physical presence for tertiary education in places that would never sustain a traditional campus.
Libraries, showgrounds, community halls, and men’s sheds also serve analogous third-space functions at the informal end, often without formal recognition as community development infrastructure. At the precinct scale, the NSW Government’s Special Activation Precincts (SAPs) represent a state-led regional precinct investment in Australia. Six SAPs have been announced across Parkes, Wagga Wagga, Moree, Snowy Mountains, Williamtown, and Narrabri, with approximately $1 billion in combined government funding and a total area of 18,800 hectares. Each precinct is designed around the competitive strengths of its location: Parkes at the junction of Australia’s two major rail spines (the Inland Rail and Trans-Australian Railway) for freight, logistics, and advanced manufacturing; Wagga Wagga as a sustainable hub for high-value production leveraging the Riverina’s agricultural base; Moree positioned on the Inland Rail corridor in the most productive grain region in Australia; and Williamtown for aerospace and defence. At a different scale, creative and cultural precincts in regional towns which may be as modest as a cluster of repurposed heritage buildings around a main street can achieve agglomeration effects for arts, hospitality, and tourism enterprises. These may have significantly less public investment but still require deliberate coordination between council, property owners, and creative enterprises.
