How to Live Well?

Principal delegate: Ernst Götsch
Respondents: Damian Christinger and students of ZHdK

Secure access to land for cultivation and farming has become a pivotal issue for many rural communities. Experiments in land commoning, performed in small-scale economic and social entities propose to conceptualize farms as community assets and seek to protect land through radical, eco-democratic structures. Involved with intense land restoration (rehabilitation of overused farmland), citizen-based counter-expertise innovations, models of collective land stewardship, and political activism, among other activities, these micro-communities contribute to new forms of world making.

In Brazil, syntropic long-term research—that is research into methodologies of land conservation tending towards greater order, organization, and energy concentration—applied to the conversion of large-scale tracts of degraded land into productive and diverse agroforests has created new state-of-the-art techniques of rapid recoveries of poor soil by imitating existing patterns in nature, used meanwhile on commercial scale. These models help us understand better the world we live in, the risks and challenges we face, and how to re-articulate questions of “well being”.