Compassionate Commons (C鲁N) Culture / Care / Community / Neighbourhood
Compassionate Commons (C鲁N) explores how lived, sensory, and intergenerational experiences of neighbourhoods shape health, well-being, and belonging, and how care can be reimagined as a shared spatial and civic practice where people live.
Affiliation
About the research project
Compassionate Commons (C鲁N) is a transdisciplinary research initiative investigating how inhabitants experience their neighbourhoods as places of care, and how these experiences influence health, well-being, dignity, and sense of belonging across generations. The project starts from the premise that health is not produced solely within institutions, but emerges through everyday spatial, social, cultural, and sensory relations in the places where people live.
C鲁N reframes neighbourhoods as commons: shared environments where care is a collective civic and spatial responsibility. Through arts-based and participatory research methods, the project explores how atmosphere, sound, materiality, proximity to nature, social interaction, and cultural participation shape lived experience and well-being. Particular attention is given to intergenerational perspectives and to groups often underrepresented in planning and health-related decision-making, including older adults, children and youth, migrants, and people with physical or psychological functional variations.
Methodologically, C鲁N combines artistic research, architectural and spatial inquiry, and social sciences and humanities (SSH). Creative labs using drawing, storytelling, sound, and spatial prototyping function as research tools to access embodied and tacit knowledge that conventional methods often overlook. These insights are translated into spatial strategies and policy-relevant recommendations for municipalities, cultural institutions, and care actors.
By relocating and reimagining care within everyday neighbourhoods, C鲁N contributes to new models for inclusive, multigenerational, and compassionate communities aligned with the values of the New European Bauhaus: sustainability, inclusion, and quality of experience beyond functionality.
Funding
Strategic research funding from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen Aligned with the New European Bauhaus (NEB) framework and preparatory work toward a HORIZON-NEB Research and Innovation Action
People
Project members
J茅r么me Picard Associate Professor, Design & Architecture
Wolfgang Schmid Professor, Music, Care & Participatory Research
Eamon O鈥橩ane Professor, Visual Art & Artistic Research