”A living community connecting people with our planet and a society in mutation”. The Ideal Village research program is born from interviews insight such as disconnections occurring between peoples expectations of sustainability, resilience, sociability and desirability and their current housing and community experience¹ . Nevertheless, our societies are witnessing a constant urban growth and urban sprawl, with different types of migrations. Expanding exponentially to attain a critical mass within two decades; the environmental migration is already redefining all aspects of our socio ecosystems. The challenge lies in seeing it as a possibility rather than a problem.

How do we investigate, speculate and test new community scenarios that could tackle the current environmental human migration with structural, cultural, social, environmental sustainability?
Each social context is unique and animated by multiple interactions at many levels: the answer is local, complex and can not be universal. We believe idealistic design ² has the capability to counterstrike social fragmentation animated by hyper individualization. (Re)discovering social patterns and interactions that create a sense of community is crucial to the project. The (re)activation of the commons will be critically important.

Following our Transformative Design process, we observe and reflect on the socio ecosystems of a selection of existing village around the world to define their current state-of-the-art, and we extract and refine a versatile “low- tech grammar” to craft new scenarios with, inspired by and for specific communities. Secondly, a specific focus is operated in the Bergen in Norway and Marseille in France regions and among other locations as a pilot project to test in real scale the new scenarios such as new structure, material, interaction, ritual, metabolism, connection. The outcome is not only a reliable pedagogical and speculative resource for citizens, urban planners, political leaders and entrepreneurs to debate, define and test, refine and initiate an efficient paradigm shift in our communities, but also and specifically to test scenarios tackling the current environmental migration issues. The research project is thematic, investigative and process-oriented; it is not towards a beforehand defined product or result.