This document lays out the co-design strategy used in the design and implementation of the EU-funded project Station for Transformation unfolding in Rovereto (Italian Alps) between 2024 and 2027. The methodology is closely aligned with the New European Bauhaus approach and focuses on enhancing the local community’s capacities to transformatively engage with the challenges posed by climate change and biodiversity loss.
We work at a train station. Not at the ticket counter, the bar, or the toilets, but at a grassroots community academy called La Foresta, located right next to the office of the railway police. We have worked here since 2017, first around and now in our local train station, as a group of actively engaged citizens, freelance educators, researchers in the wild, and change-oriented feral entrepreneurs.
In this chapter, I explore the following questions:
• How can design strategically strengthen non-capitalist and postcapitalist economies and increase the social power of those sustaining them?
• What role does aesthetics plays in shifting power towards postcapitalist modes of life?
• How can it more effectively contribute to make postcapitalist modes of life both widely desirable and translocally regenerative?
This chapter is based on a keynote at the By Design or By Disaster conference at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in 2024.
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.
What can it mean to shift from a critical to a caring design practice? I raise this issue as urgent and significant within the interdependent planetary dynamics of climate breakdown, rapid species extinction and the vertiginous exacerbation of social inequalities spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. To explore this question, I take my own participatory and research-led design practice as a reference point that helps me to ref lect on how care can be central to design practices today.
