Community-Based Creative Industry Services and Energy-Efficient Technologies
Identification of Social Problem
In disadvantaged communities struggling with unemployment or underpaid individuals, people often feel undervalued and fail to recognize their extraordinary resources. Traditional gentle technologies employed in environmental and community-oriented folk architecture are part of our culture but are frequently forgotten. It is important to assess individual competencies, intellectual cultural traditions of communities, and potential innovations and traditions, as well as to promote awareness, recognition, and mobilization of sustainability, which can lead to the creation of self-help projects by strengthening values. The cultural and creative sector connects the areas of identity-enhancing heritage preservation, art, culture, economy, and modern technology.
Expected Societal/Economic/Environmental Benefits of the Research
The project examines the topic of sustainability from the perspective of community-based solutions, seeking to find its place alongside costly, infrastructure-intensive, often self-serving centralized provisions or for-profit solutions primarily focused on market returns in addressing the issues of energy crisis or food scarcity. It explores possibilities of self-sufficiency, development of energy support for community institutions, but primarily seeks not technological solutions, rather uncovers community resources as conditions for establishing community-based services. Such resources include trust, solidarity, organization, learning, and social capital. The condition of these resources reflects the state of a given society, thus the deficit (alienation, indifference, apathy, anomie, learned helplessness, loneliness) arising from them becomes a focal point of social problem. The research and development can support the work of local governments, museums, libraries, cultural and community centers (workshops, collaborative works involving municipal, museum, library, public cultural and civil professionals, university researchers, and developers).
Contact
Mária Arapovics (Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Social Sciences)
E-mail