Living Knowledge
Ideas, research, practices and events to better understand communities, places and shared wellbeing.
Featured
Three different ways of measuring wellbeing beyond GDP, focusing on what helps people and places live well.
Evidence Wellbeing & Happiness
The annual report ranking subjective wellbeing across countries, combining income, social support, health, freedom and trust.
What stands out in its data is that social support and trust weigh as much as income in people's perceived wellbeing.
Evidence Wellbeing & Happiness
A system of indicators that places eleven dimensions of wellbeing alongside GDP: from health to environment, from relationships to safety.
We find convincing the idea that measuring progress needs more than a single economic number.
Evidence Wellbeing & Happiness
Italy's national system of Fair and Sustainable Wellbeing indicators, reading equity, sustainability and quality of life across Italian places.
Every Italian place already has wellbeing data available: we find it useful to read them together with the people who live there.
Theories, concepts and authors that shape how we read communities and places.
Ideas Wellbeing & Happiness
An approach to development that measures wellbeing not only through income, but through people's real freedom to choose the life they have reason to value.
We read wellbeing also as real freedom to choose, not only as the resources a person has available.
Ideas Wellbeing & Happiness
Wellbeing does not come only from individual resources, but from the quality of relationships: trust, recognition, belonging.
In our reading, relationships are not a backdrop to wellbeing but one of its constitutive parts.
Ideas Social Economy
Italy's civil economy tradition has, for centuries, linked public happiness, reciprocity and the market, against the idea of an economy neutral to human relationships.
We are drawn to the idea that the economy can also be a place of reciprocity, not only of exchange.
Ideas Culture & Heritage
Culture, traditions and intangible heritage work as commons when a community actually lives, cares for and regenerates them, not when they are kept at a distance.
We tend to read commons as such above all when someone takes care of them together with others.
Ideas Culture & Heritage
The Faro Convention (2005) introduces the idea of 'heritage communities': groups of people who value a heritage and want to look after and pass it on together.
We take from it an idea of heritage less tied to ownership and more to the care of those who live it.
Ideas Social Economy
A perspective on social impact as part of an economic approach that brings together the person, substantive freedoms, relationships, alliances and the collective capacity of ecosystems.
Measuring impact means making visible what we value: freedom, relationships, shared wellbeing and the quality of ecosystems. Evaluation can therefore help orient how we imagine and build development.
Ideas Community
Leo XIV's social encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It brings together dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, participation, shared responsibility and technology at the service of humanity.
Human flourishing takes place within relationships, communities and shared goods. Institutions and technologies can strengthen freedom, participation and responsibility.
Reports, data and indicator frameworks to check what we observe against.
Evidence Wellbeing & Happiness
Since 1990, the United Nations report has proposed the Human Development Index, placing health, education and income on the same footing.
We prefer to measure development also in human lives, not only in gross domestic product.
Evidence Wellbeing & Happiness
The World Health Organization recognises loneliness and social isolation as a global public health priority, on a par with other risk factors.
The WHO too frames relationships as a matter of public health, not only of personal wellbeing.
Evidence Poverty & Fragility
A mapping of social and economic fragility across Italian places, cross-read with the responses of the third sector and the social economy.
Fragilities tend to concentrate in places, but that is often also where the most effective responses are born.
Experiences and organisations to learn from, in Italy and beyond.
Practices Community
Neighbourhood spaces that welcome needs, connect residents and services, and turn proximity into everyday mutual care.
Proximity can become community infrastructure where accessible places, listening and ongoing relationships exist.
Practices Community
A network of neighbourhood houses run together with residents, where culture, sociability and public services share the same space.
Public services seem to work better when the people who use them genuinely help design them, not only receive them.
Practices Culture & Heritage
A platform that gathers and connects community knowledge, skills and practices, making them visible and reusable by other places.
A lot of local knowledge already exists, scattered: what seems to be missing most is a place able to connect it.
Practices Culture & Heritage
The network of bodies and communities that put the principles of the Faro Convention into practice in their own places, sharing practices and experience.
Principles seem to become practice when several places test them and compare notes with one another.
Practices Culture & Heritage
A Portuguese festival and movement of world dance and music that builds temporary communities around celebration, transmission and encounter.
What interests us is that a community can be born for just a few days, and still leave a lasting mark.
Practices Social Economy
An innovation centre linking food, education and places, promoting a transformation of food systems starting from local communities.
For us, food is a concrete entry point for talking about community, culture and place together.
Festivals, gatherings and occasions worth following.
Florence
Why we're following it The national gathering of the civil economy movement, the theoretical frame that shapes Living Commons' work on community and economy.
Bertinoro
Why we're following it AICCON's annual gathering on civil economy research and practice: a direct read on where the debate that feeds Living Knowledge is heading.
Rimini
Why we're following it The reference trade fair on the circular economy and places: useful for reading how environmental policy meets, or misses, local communities.
Bologna and online
Why we're following it A gathering on how to sustainably fund cultural projects: closely relevant to the sustainability of practices like the ones gathered in Living Knowledge.
How it connects
We gather and connect knowledge. Theories, research and practices that help us read communities and places.
We produce new knowledge. Listening to places, data, social research, observing needs and resources.
We turn knowledge into action. Design, experimentation, facilitation and evaluation.
