MESSINA – The mayor of Messina Federico Basile and the founder of the Messina Foundation Gaetano Giunta launched the proposal for “a great alliance for the social economy and the ecological transition”, on the day in which they presented the results of the “Sci Fiction Economics Residency ”. This is a week-long operation in which around 20 economists, policy makers, artists and writers were brought together to try to imagine a Messina of the future that was sustainable on an environmental and social level.
Council: “A future is only possible if we build visions”
Basile explained that “the City also greatly needs initiatives of this type to send a cultural message”. Giunta stated: “Generally, science fiction, narratives of the future, take dominant economic approaches to extremes, which have a highly unfair and predatory character, outlining dystopian worlds. And instead in these days we wanted to imagine eutopian futures: more beautiful and achievable worlds. The possible future, after all, arises from the ability to build visions: many of the steps forward that have been made in history would not have been achieved if they had not been imagined first.” And so there was talk of “a great alliance in our city between the different subjects to share horizons and ‘prophecies’ and to grow together forms of solidarity economies, in part already experimented by the Foundation itself. And having as a cornerstone new economic approaches that aim to combat inequalities and fight climate change.”
Basile: “Everyone must do their part for the relaunch”
A proposal shared by Mayor Basile, who underlined how “at the start of the Residency I had the opportunity to listen to extremely interesting analyzes not only on the economic aspects but also on the social ones, today more crucial than ever for a city like Messina which is starting to change and must be encouraged to relaunch itself by focusing on its own abilities, which are many”. This is the case, among many, of the Messina Brewery, a successful workers buyout promoted by the Messina Foundation. A constant collaboration, that between the philanthropic body and the cooperative, which will soon start the production of new bioplastics with threshers and beer processing waste, also thanks to the partnership of Crossing, a spin-off of the Cà Foscari University of Venice, and of the Engineering Department of the University of Messina. “If everyone does their part in relaunching the area, great progress can be made. Even starting from visions that can become reality”, concluded Basile.
What is the Sci-Fi Economics Residency
The “Science Fiction Economics Residency”, co-created with Egderyders, is a community born as a project of the Council of Europe and the EU Commission and then became a social enterprise and a worksite of ideas to which we owe the Science Fiction Economics Lab in which economists , science fiction authors, activists, public officials gather online using science fiction to free their economic imagination and think of worlds different from this one, but not so different that they cannot create them collectively. The participants were divided into three working groups and sketched the plot of real stories with a Messina of 2050 aligned with the Paris agreements at the center. Some very interesting ideas have emerged, including a Mediterranean transition plan powered by solar energy and a system of social cooperatives with the mission of making the city’s building stock much more energy efficient and more accessible.
Nadia Alter, co-founder of Edgeryders, said: “For our Lab we thought of Messina because it is a cutting-edge laboratory with regards to social, climatic and economic experiments. In this the Messina Foundation has already created a sort of utopia and is implementing experiments that can be replicated in other parts of Sicily and the Mediterranean. With them we found a strong consonance of values on an artistic, cultural, economic and entrepreneurial level: the right context in which to ‘drop’ our imagination and think about future scenarios”. Now the SciFi Economics Lab community will refine the plots from which narratives will be produced. Comic, novel, short film: the form is to be evaluated, but the process has started.
