COMMON GROUND

COMMON GROUND maps how communities respond collectively to two shared conditions: disasters — earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides — and depopulation, the emptying of rural and inner areas, ageing villages, the loss of local economies. Japan and Italy anchor the atlas; cases from forty-two further countries, across every inhabited continent, widen the field.

It is the desk-research phase of a practice-based project. The question is twofold: which forms of collective intelligence recur across distant communities facing the same problem, and where potential connections exist that have never been activated.

The nodes sit on three layers. Community cases document how a specific place organised after a crisis. Art practices record community-based and socially engaged art working on the same problems. Collective practices name recurring forms of collective action — machizukuri, mutual aid networks, community cooperatives, grassroots memory archives. Every node and every documented connection is traceable to a cited source.

Two kinds of links appear on the map. Documented connections record ties stated in sources: shared organisers, transferred methods, collaborations. Latent connections are computed: they join communities more than 1,500 km apart that face the same family of problems and respond with similar practices, network forms and scales, yet have no documented tie. The mycelium is the conceptual model of that hidden connectivity; network analysis is the operative method.

Latent connections remain hypotheses. The next phase of the research tests them through fieldwork with the communities themselves: exchanges, workshops and collaborative artworks that bring distant groups into contact and observe what they learn from each other.

This release is pilot dataset v0.2: 114 nodes, 26 documented connections and 149 latent ones. All sources were accessed on 18 September 2026.