About

What? New European Bauhaus meets Community Economies is a two-year Erasmus+ project that engages with diverse bottom-up community initiatives recognized by New European Bauhaus Price. Since 2021 the NEB prize has given an echo and offered recognition to community practices across the European Union and beyond. Two of the 2022 prize finalists, Forno Vagabondo (a traveling bread oven engaging local communities through baking into issues of food sovereignty around Trentino) and Krater (a community-led production space for eco-social practitioners in a former wasteland in the heart of the city of Ljubljana) joined in taking the initiative of connecting and empowering the communities’ efforts in grounding the ecological transition. 

Why? Although these initiatives contribute actively and substantially to the EU’s ecological transition and their success and impact are recognised, they often struggle with precarious or low funding situations. Based on the experience of La Foresta (Rovereto, IT) and Trajna (Ljubljana, SI), we will map and analyze the behind-the-scenes of such projects, with a special focus on what kind of economic reasoning and acting makes such projects viable and potentially resilient in the long-term. It is only by finding empowering economic strategies that NEB projects can succeed in the long-run and effectively contribute to the EU's ecological transition.

How? To shed a light on these often invisible struggles we are drawing on community economies approach, i.e. an approach championed by economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham that places the well-being of people and nature at its core. Community economies approaches value non-monetised social and ecological relations, informal economic exchanges and acts of communal care. By identification and sharing of a diverse range of successful economic strategies and tactics of finalists of the New European Bauhaus Prize 2022 we aim at providing a detailed study of the ways in which these economic strategies were launched and how they contribute to make the projects and organizations sustainable over time. Through studying, mapping and disseminating the economic strategies of successful NEB projects we want to create a shared corpus of knowledge supported by a network of diverse communities. 

The core of the project unfolds around three interrelated activities - network creation, online seminars and winter school. With the first one we identify the community practices and invite them to participate in the six online seminar sessions. Each seminar uses a different tool to map the specific aspect we want to address. In the second year, we gather at Rovereto at winter school to further enhance our capacities and strengthen the network.