They built an alternative community - Docu - 2014
102How would people organize an alternative community if they could start all over again?
Shortly before the municipal elections, VPRO backlight, inspired by the reality TV program Utopia, together with the brand new professor of community development Justus Uitermark looks into how people would organize their own alternative community if they could start again.
Original title: Youtopia (VPRO backlight)
Vpro backlight goes to three local alternative communities in which people who are not able to handle the existing political system try to turn towards a different direction. The post-capitalist hacker colony of Calafou, in the outskirts of Barcelona, the Hungarian eco-village of Galgahéviz that has shut itself off from Europe and decided to make its own rules and free-think city of Bristol, declared the happiest and best city in England.
In Calafou, hackers are building an open hardware, software and an independent communication network.
In the ecovillage of Galgaheviz in rural Hungary, the founders, like in Calafou, oppose the global capitalist system and believe in stimulating the local economy, but also in Hungary for the Hungarians.
Then there is the English city of Bristol, where the independent mayor George Ferguson cooperates with the so-called transition town movement and even lets himself be paid in their alternative currency, the Bristol pound.
What do these communities do differently, where do they need agreements needed and where can they go without? Are these communities more free than we are? And what does it say about the world we are living in now?
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2014.
© VPRO Backlight March 2014
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Credits:
Directeur: Kees Brouwer, Sabine Lubbe Bakker, Tomas Kaan
Composition: Sabine Lubbe Bakker
Research: Marijntje Denters, Chris Vijn
Production: Jenny Borger, Helen Goossens, Marie Schutgens
Editors: Henneke Hagen, Frank Wiering
English, French and Spanish subtitles: Ericsson.
French and Spanish subtitles are co-funded by European Union.