^{(Photo: North Brooklyn Farm (NBF) across the river from the Empire State Building and uptown Manhattan is a site for agritourism where crops are grown).}

Project management:Axel Paul
Project team:Dietmar Wetzel, Sanna Frischknecht, Moritz Maurer
Duration: 04/2016–04/2021
Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

This research project takes its starting point from frequently diagnosed ecological and economic crises. More than forty years have passed since the publication of the report “The Limits of Growth.” Since then, but especially in the aftermath of the 1968 movement, a whole host of projects and communities have attempted—and in some cases are still attempting—to establish other forms of life that go beyond the capitalist market economy. Rather than focusing on relatively self-sufficient communities, this project centers on initiatives in (semi-)urban areas that seek to assert themselves within the social mainstream. Co-housing and contract-farming initiatives should be understood as sites of social innovation that seek to oppose the prevailing logics of production and consumption, which are largely mediated by the market, by appealing to alternative models that, in their essence, emphasize communal and cooperative forms of living. The search for alternative ways of living makes these groups extremely important objects of study not only from a sociological, but also from a sociopolitical perspective. The research project is framed by the question of whether and to what extent transformative communities, such as co-housing and contract-farming projects, can be understood as innovative forms of life.

Frischknecht, S. and Haas, B. (2020) 'Ethnographic approaches in cooperative research - fields, methods and epistemological interests', in Schultz-Nieswand, F. et al. (eds.) Handbuch Genossenschaftswesen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 1-30.

Frischknecht, S., Maurer, M. and Wetzel, D. J. (2017) 'Capitalism as a way of life? Patterns of interpretation, legitimation and critique in the market society', Swiss Journal of Sociology. 43(1), S. 223-227.

Wetzel, D. J. (2016) 'Two Examples of Recent Aesthetico-Political Forms of Community: Occupy and Sharing Economy', in Claviez, T. (ed.) The Common Growl. Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community. New York: Fordham University Press (Commonalities), pp. 159-173.

Wetzel, D. J. and Frischknecht, S. (2018) "Interpreting housing as social innovations? Community-cooperative forms of housing in German-speaking Switzerland', in Franz, H.-W. and Kaletka, C. (eds.) Shaping social innovations locally. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 233-248.

Wetzel, D. J. (2020) "Transformative communities as alternative forms of life? Conceptual reflections and empirical findings (co-housing in Switzerland) ", in Claviez, T. et al. (eds) Critique of Authenticity, Wilmington: Vernon Press, pp. 209-222.