A conversation between Bianca Elzenbaumer and David Bollier, exploring how the design work produced by Brave New Alps does not aim for market development and conventional investment, but for participatory vehicles that honor social imagination, improvisation, and collective impact.
In this text I share some key working principles and community projects that under-pin how I contribute to the collective regenerative work underway in the Italian Lagarina valley.
I introduce the working principles of “commons” and “community economies” that permeate my work, subsequently explaining how these principles manifest themselves as theory-practice relays (aka practical projects in a close and creative conversation with theory) within (and via) the community academy La Foresta2—a physical space and a collective that I co-founded.
Living-and often thriving-in the cracks between the business world and the state system is an amazing variety of organisations which, according to some economists, theoretically shouldn’t exist. That’s because their goal is not to make profits but to meet social needs which both the market and government either can’t meet nearly as well or have totally ignored.
An investigation through texts, interviews, and documentation of the complex relationship between the urban, the rural, and contemporary cultural production.
