NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS meets COMMUNITY ECONOMIES

In collaboration with La Foresta and Trajna (SLO), we have just embarked on our first Erasmus+ project with a focus on studying, mapping and disseminating innovative economic models of finalists of the New European Bauhaus Prize.

 

In Europe, there are many cultural realities that contribute actively and substantially to the EU’s ecological transition and to generate an inclusive social welfare for their community. However, these realities often struggle with precarious or low funding situations despite their recognised success and impact. Within last year’s New European Bauhaus Prize, several of the finalists – such as La Foresta with its project Forno Vagabondo and Trajna with its project Krater – mobilize intricate, effective and empowering economic relations that are inspired by a community economies approach to cope with this precarity in funding. The community economies approach, i.e. an approach that places the well-being of people and nature at its core, while valuing social and ecological relations, informal economic exchanges and acts of communal care as core drivers for their initiatives.

 

Given the fact that the EU champions projects such as Forno Vagabondo (a traveling bread oven engaging local communities through baking into issues of food sovereignty) and Krater (a community-led production space for eco-social practitioners in a former wasteland in the heart of the city of Ljubljana), with NEB ECONOMIES we would like to map, analyse and showcase what is going on behind the scenes of such projects, with a special focus on what kind of economic reasoning and acting makes such projects viable and (possibly) resilient in the long-term. We thus want to share the “behind the scenes” of best NEB practices on a larger scale in order to support other Europeans in a shared effort to become the first climate-neutral continent, while also creating economies that value the people that make change happen and that care for climate and biodiversity.

 

 

Studying, mapping and disseminating the economic strategies of successful NEB projects is important, because so far NEB does almost not address the economies behind the project that it champions across Europe. 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. We want to put the focus on this – so far – underrated area of NEB.