Visions of a good life: between the present we live and the future we imagine

A good life is not merely an individual aspiration. Ideas of well-being, success, and personal fulfilment are socially constructed and shaped by material conditions, shared values, and the expectations of the future that characterize each historical moment.

In a context marked by precarity, the ecological crisis, and biographical uncertainty, promises of progress, job security, and upward social mobility have lost much of their force. The question of the good life thus becomes a practical one: how can meaningful ways of living be created and sustained when the future no longer appears as a guaranteed promise?

The project examines life trajectories that deliberately depart from dominant models and explores how particular visions of a good life take shape through alternative ways of organizing housing, work, care, and community. In this process, individuals and collectives act as “moral entrepreneurs”—in Becker’s sense of the term—by promoting life projects organized around new values, norms, and forms of living together.

The project starts from the premise that imagining a different life is not the same as being able to live it. To become reality, these imaginaries require time, relationships, spaces, resources, and forms of organization. The research seeks to understand how different visions of well-being and the future become concrete ways of organizing the present, and what possibilities, tensions, and exclusions emerge when they are put into practice.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Scope of the Study

The research is conducted in Catalonia and focuses on three types of collective experiences:

• housing cooperatives and senior cohousing projects;

• agroecological and neo-rural initiatives;

• spiritual and monastic communities.

The selection of cases reflects an interest in examining projects that challenge three pillars of the capitalist status quo: housing as private property, work as the primary basis of survival and identity, and the family as the sole provider of care. The sample includes experiences with varying degrees of consolidation, different forms of communal living, and diverse frameworks of meaning, while seeking diversity in terms of the age and gender of participants.

Methodology

The research adopts a comparative qualitative design based on biographical interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. This approach makes it possible to examine both imaginaries of well-being and the everyday practices, social relationships, and material conditions that enable --or hinder-- the consolidation of these ways of life.

Objectives

The project pursues four main objectives:

• to examine how visions of a good life are constructed today in contexts of uncertainty;

• to understand how these imaginaries are translated into everyday practices and forms of social organization;

• to identify the social, material, and relational conditions that enable or constrain their sustainability;

• to contribute to debates on future imaginaries, well-being, and contemporary social transformations.

Name of the project	Visions of a good life: between the present we live and the future we imagine
Reasearch team	Mar Griera (IP), Laura Moreno González, Laia Garcia Muñoz, Almodis Cebrià Salvador, Alex Puente Requena
Project Duration	2025-2026 (Ongoing)
Funding	This project is funded through the ICREA Academia programme of the Catalan University and Research Grants Management Agency (AGAUR). The grant was awarded to Dr. Maria del Mar Griera Llonch.