Lives in Common is a blog to talk about community living, forms of cooperation and sharing that different groups of people experience worldwide.
We are interested in understanding what currently motivates people to live together, to share tangible and intangible assets and the related benefits. In our research we are collecting life stories of people who have chosen to turn their dream into a concrete and collective experiment.
Historically, many communities formed for political and ideological reasons, in order to enable people to find a new identity and free themselves from imposed social patterns. But something has changed between contemporary communities and those of the first generation, according to Rossella Anitori. In his publication Lives Together (Derive Marinas , 2012) we read:
“The communities of second generation differ from the first generation in several respects. They represent, from different points of view, a more advanced stage of the communitarian process. If the first communities are experiences of protest, the latter manifest themselves as an attempt to be proactive. They still develop an oppositional tension but it is much more consolidated: this tension is a basis from which to start and no longer the goal to strive for. After adolescent time follows adulthood. The need to establish a new relationship with nature and between people, the need to move from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective becomes a pivotal inspiration for many communitarian experiences. There is a great number of people moved by instances not only rooted in the in the class struggle but driven by a broader ecological consciousness, which undoubtedly contains all the prerequisites for a future society”.
We’re observing in our research that the construction of a future society is currently one of the most frequent reasons motivating a life choice of sharing. We retain this reason one of the most valuable because it represents the emergence of a collective imaginary projected toward the evolution of the human being from a material, cultural and spiritual point of view.
In the book Les sentiers de l’utopie (Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, La Découverte, 2012) it says:
“The future is no longer what it used to be. Our utopian imagination has atrophied because of the suffocating apocalyptic predictions: climate catastrophe, energies shortage, species extinction on a large scale, economic collapse, war of resources. It seems much easier to imagine a dying world that a better world. But it is precisely when the utopia becomes unimaginable that is more necessary. This utopia is not a nowhere-country where to escape, nor a universal system, nor a perfect future, but it is something that takes us by the gut, which reminds us that we cannot accept to live with the crumbs of this present”.
The financial and economic crisis in which we find ourselves has definitely intensified this desire to come up with alternative collective solutions for our existence and has accelerated a process of social transformation. Economic logics and profit don’t have any longer a relevant role in our lives, instead people’s needs are at the center of a new life project.
But the urgency of this time has only given a boost to something that, in our opinion, is already present in the human consciousness: the need to meet, to share goods and values, to join forces in order to achieve a real change towards a better future.
For those who have that kind of universal ambition, changing is part of a collective effort but it starts first of all from a personal drive. In the documentary We Love You, dedicated to the Rainbow movement, a girl affirms: “If we are capable to evolve, the planet will evolve”. In fact, it is the group which allows the individual to evolve, as the community of the Unitary Science asserts:
“The gaze of the others is necessary, the mirror they represent is a way to put deeply into question pride and selfishness. The presence of others allow us to move from a subjective notion of ourselves to a more objective one. It is as if the objectivity derived from the average of many subjectivities”.
In the publication Les sentiers de l’ utopias, Dolores of the ZEGG community says:
“Our lives need a real community in order to get to know each other from the inside, to be visible and seen at a deeper level, even if such contact may be disturbing and necessarily causes turmoils”.
These are some of the stories of alternative lives that we want to share with you. Our intention is to build a compendium of tips, best practices and stories that we hope might be useful to anyone who is interested in exploring those issues or wants to revolutionise his/her life by simply putting them into practice. We will be happy to take you in this adventure.
Lives in Common 