Italy Living Lab – Roccavivara (Molise)
Reimagining inner areas through education, autonomy, and rural regeneration.
Overview
The Italy Living Lab is based in Roccavivara, a village in the inner areas of Molise, southern Italy. Here, AIBIA is developing an intentional educational communit
y and future cooperative school that links rural life with international higher education, grassroots democracy, and non-capitalist economies.
This Lab is AIBIA’s European anchor: a rural campus-in-the-making where students, researchers, local residents, and practitioners can live and learn together, experiment with alternative ways of organizing community, and co-create concrete responses to depopulation, economic marginalization, and ecological crisis.
Why Molise? Why Inner Areas?
out-migration and aging populations,
reduced public services,
precarious or mono-crop economies,
and limited educational opportunities.
At the same time, they are rich in:
land, food cultures, and ecological diversity,
strong social ties and mutual aid traditions,
and possibilities for experimentation that are hard to realize in big cities.
The Italy Living Lab asks: what if inner areas were reimagined as laboratories for the future of education, democracy, and sustainable living?
What We Are Building
1. An Intentional Educational Community
In Roccavivara, AIBIA has secured a site to begin building an intentional educational community and school—a place where:
students and researchers can stay for weeks or months,
everyday life (cooking, farming, maintenance) is part of the curriculum,
and local residents are co-creators, not just “hosts.”
The vision is to grow, over time, into a cooperative, non-capitalist university-like structure rooted in this territory but connected to a wider global network.
2. A Rural Campus & Living Lab Infrastructure
The Italy Lab is developing:
shared living spaces for students, researchers, and staff,
common kitchens and workshop areas,
classrooms and seminar rooms usable for field schools and retreats,
outdoor spaces for agroecology, gardening, and small-scale production.
This physical infrastructure is not just a backdrop; it is part of the experiment in communal living, shared responsibility, and autonomous governance.
3. Alternative Economies & Production
To sustain the Lab and anchor it in local life, we are developing small-scale, ethical, and cooperative economic activities, such as:
olive cultivation and oil production,
other forms of agroecology and regenerative agriculture,
potential craft distillation, wine, or food processing,
and digital/media production (films, podcasts, publications) created with and about the region.
These activities are part of a broader experiment in autonomous, community-embedded economies: how to generate livelihood without reproducing extractive or speculative models.
Education, Field Schools & Partnerships
The Italy Living Lab is a hub for experiential, university-level education, including:
Summer and winter schools bringing students into direct contact with local residents, farmers, activists, and municipal actors.
Erasmus+ cooperation partnerships and SDG-focused programs that connect Molise with partners in Germany, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Czechia, and beyond.
Workshops and residencies for postdocs, artists, writers, and practitioners working on autonomy, democracy, decolonial education, rural futures, and sustainability.
The Lab is closely linked to AIBIA’s global Think Tank and to partner universities in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean, serving as the European anchor in a wider transregional network.
Themes We Work On
The Italy Living Lab focuses on several intertwined themes:
Rural regeneration & inner areas – exploring non-touristic, non-speculative approaches to revitalizing depopulating regions.
Prefigurative democracy – experimenting with horizontal decision-making, shared governance of space, and everyday forms of autonomy.
Decolonial & critical pedagogy – challenging North–South hierarchies by situating knowledge in Molise, not just in big-city universities.
Autonomous economies & commons – building shared infrastructures (land, housing, tools, production spaces) as commons rather than private property.
Ecology, food, and land – linking agroecological practices, local food cultures, and environmental care with questions of justice and livelihood.
A Living Lab Within a Global Network
The Italy Lab does not stand alone. It is designed to:
mirror and dialogue with the Sierra Leone Lab,
host joint field schools that move between South and North,
and serve as a European node for AIBIA’s SDG Partnerships, Erasmus+ projects, and critical reimaginative theory work.
Students, researchers, and practitioners joining the Italy Lab are invited not only to learn about Molise, but to co-create long-term projects that continue after they leave: curricula, community tools, media, research, and cooperative ventures.
News & Updates (Intro Text)
Latest from the Italy Living Lab
This space gathers updates from Roccavivara and the surrounding inner areas: renovations and infrastructure work, new partnerships with local farmers and associations, student field schools, harvests and productions, and reflections from residents and visiting participants. Think of it as the Lab’s public diary — a way to follow how this rural campus is slowly taking shape.
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