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 through the lens of a theoretical framework rooted in community economies. Two of the 2022 prize finalists, Forno Vagabondo (ITA) and Krater (SLO) joined in taking the initiative of connecting and empowering the diverse communities’ efforts in grounding the ecological transition. By identification and sharing of a diverse range of successful economic strategies and tactics 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.
Although NEB and other sister 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 our collective practices 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.
To shed light on these often invisible struggles we draw 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.
The project unfolds around three interrelated activities: network creation, online seminars, and a spring school. Tools that accompany the seminars are developed to map the specific aspects of our economic relations that we want to address and analyze. The seminars are followed by a live gathering in Rovereto to create a shared corpus of knowledge, supported by a network of diverse communities, to be further used by citizen-led initiatives and public administrators across Europe.
MAPPING DIVERSE ECONOMIC RELATIONS WITH NEB PRACTITIONERS
During the webinars we will use a community economies lens to map our existing place-specific practices and share our economic strategies. Following feminist geographers Gibson-Graham and Miller, we aim to reframe and reconceptualize the essential relation between economy and ecology. We understand economy as an ecology of interdependent relations between human and more-than-human beings.
We are focusing on projects that have been developed and implemented by other finalists of the NEB Prize while also opening the network to other projects in order to unite our efforts. Together, through mapping diverse experiences, we hope to reveal how to support these types of initiatives beyond funding and precarious conditions. We want to contribute to organizational capacity building amongst the NEB community to favor new community economic collaborations at a local and transnational level.
During the six learning sessions we will map our practices, together with invited participants. The webinars will take place once per month between April and June and later on between September and November 2024.
Description: We map what we are producing that sustains well-being for our own lives, our partners and our communities.
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A 4-day community economies spring school will take place in Rovereto (IT) in 2025. To support network consolidation, the school will provide a space to refine how we share the mapped practices and learnings. More info in autumn!
Coming soon. We're working to compile the mapping tools and resources featured in our webinars into one comprehensive publication. This package will be available for download, enabling you to access and utilize these invaluable resources for your own initiatives. Stay tuned for updates on its release!
Useful references:
La Foresta - Community Academy and Trajna are a group of friends running pioneering initiatives focused on cultural and eco-social innovation. La Foresta, based at the regenerated train station of Rovereto based in the Italian Alps, unites cultural associations, informal groups, and active citizens to work on community cohesion, agro-ecological transition, mental health, and social innovation for community entrepreneurship. One of its core projects, Forno Vagabondo, a traveling bread oven, engages local communities in food sovereignty discussions. Trajna, a Slovenian cultural association, promotes regenerative material cultures and feral spatial practices among creative communities, decision-makers, and educational and cultural institutions. It has pioneered strategies for managing invasive species, founded the Notweed paper, and launched the Creative Laboratory Krater to care for and repair an 18,000m2 pioneering ecosystem emerging from a former construction site in Ljubljana and facilitate (trans)disciplinary collaborations for and with eco-social practitioners.
Contact us at info@trajna.com & silviacohn@laforesta.net or follow us on IG at @kratercollective / @la.foresta.rovereto.
Production: Trajna & La Foresta - Accademia di comunità. Graphic Design: Mainly Afternoon. Illustration: Justine Hartwig. Programming: Marameo Lab © 2024.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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 through the lens of a theoretical framework rooted in community economies. Two of the 2022 prize finalists, Forno Vagabondo (ITA) and Krater (SLO) joined in taking the initiative of connecting and empowering the diverse communities’ efforts in grounding the ecological transition. By identification and sharing of a diverse range of successful economic strategies and tactics 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.
Although NEB and other sister 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 our collective practices 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.
To shed light on these often invisible struggles we draw 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.
The project unfolds around three interrelated activities: network creation, online seminars, and a spring school. Tools that accompany the seminars are developed to map the specific aspects of our economic relations that we want to address and analyze. The seminars are followed by a live gathering in Rovereto to create a shared corpus of knowledge, supported by a network of diverse communities, to be further used by citizen-led initiatives and public administrators across Europe.
MAPPING DIVERSE ECONOMIC RELATIONS WITH NEB PRACTITIONERS
During the webinars we will use a community economies lens to map our existing place-specific practices and share our economic strategies. Following feminist geographers Gibson-Graham and Miller, we aim to reframe and reconceptualize the essential relation between economy and ecology. We understand economy as an ecology of interdependent relations between human and more-than-human beings.
We are focusing on projects that have been developed and implemented by other finalists of the NEB Prize while also opening the network to other projects in order to unite our efforts. Together, through mapping diverse experiences, we hope to reveal how to support these types of initiatives beyond funding and precarious conditions. We want to contribute to organizational capacity building amongst the NEB community to favor new community economic collaborations at a local and transnational level.
During the six learning sessions we will map our practices, together with invited participants. The webinars will take place once per month between April and June and later on between September and November 2024.
A 4-day community economies spring school will take place in Rovereto (IT) in 2025. To support network consolidation, the school will provide a space to refine how we share the mapped practices and learnings. More info in autumn!
Coming soon. We're working to compile the mapping tools and resources featured in our webinars into one comprehensive publication. This package will be available for download, enabling you to access and utilize these invaluable resources for your own initiatives. Stay tuned for updates on its release!
Useful references:
La Foresta - Community Academy and Trajna are a group of friends running pioneering initiatives focused on cultural and eco-social innovation. La Foresta, based at the regenerated train station of Rovereto based in the Italian Alps, unites cultural associations, informal groups, and active citizens to work on community cohesion, agro-ecological transition, mental health, and social innovation for community entrepreneurship. One of its core projects, Forno Vagabondo, a traveling bread oven, engages local communities in food sovereignty discussions. Trajna, a Slovenian cultural association, promotes regenerative material cultures and feral spatial practices among creative communities, decision-makers, and educational and cultural institutions. It has pioneered strategies for managing invasive species, founded the Notweed paper, and launched the Creative Laboratory Krater to care for and repair an 18,000m2 pioneering ecosystem emerging from a former construction site in Ljubljana and facilitate (trans)disciplinary collaborations for and with eco-social practitioners.
Contact us at info@trajna.com & ciao@laforesta.net or follow us on IG at @kratercollective / @la.foresta.rovereto.
Production: Trajna & La Foresta - Accademia di comunità. Graphic Design: Mainly Afternoon. Illustration: Justine Hartwig. Programming: Marameo Lab © 2024.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.