The year 2018 ends with contradictory signals. If, on the one hand, there is a growing intolerance with European economic policies based on austerity, on the other hand, the fear of the "different" breaches a European society that is more and more individualized and more and more fragmented.

Yet good practices of welfare from below are spreading. New experiments are advancing.

In France, the Parisian assembly of the Jilet Jaunes movement has published an appeal to create bottom-up coordination on the model of the Paris Commune:

"Now we have to meet everywhere, to form city assemblies, popular, on a human scale, where words and listening are queens. Assemblies in which, as in Commercy, every decision is taken collectively, where delegates are designated to apply and set to music the decisions. Not the other way around! Not like in the current system. These assemblies will carry our egalitarian, social and ecological popular demands. ... we create the Assembly of the Assemblies, the Common of the Commons This is the meaning of the History, it is our proposal" (https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-pierre-anselme/blog/301218/les-gilets-jaunes-de-

commercy-lancent-une-coordination-nationale).

Following the example of Riace, in some small Italian municipalities we continue to experiment with a new model of integration of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea. A model that goes far beyond simple labour integration but that also experiments with alternative practices in land management.

Recently, the Manifesto of Stivigliano (a small semi-abandoned village in Central Italy) has been drawn up: First lineaments of a new economic policy - Self-convoked Assembly of Stivigliano (http://effimera.org/?s=Manifesto+di+Stivigliano). In this document, policies of territorial and residential requalification are envisaged in some areas of great artistic and historical impact, thanks to intervention of repopulation that could leverage on the migratory phenomenon, as happened in Riace.

On the same topics, the launch of the "Mediterranea" project (https://mediterranearescue.org/), aimed at helping migrants in difficulty in the Mediterranean, counteracts the selfish closure of the human acceptance routes and auspicates a reversal of European migration policies.

Last but not least, 2019 could be the year of the first experimentauion of the Money of the Commonwealth at municipality level. The City Council of Naples has indeed opened a table to discuss this alterntive tool to better implement the municipality budget, which is under strict constraints because of austerity policies.

All good reasons to wish a better new year to everyone