Theme
Discover/Skills & Competences

Skills & Competences

Common spaces are powerful learning environments where people acquire both practical and relational skills through informal, hands-on experiences. They foster technical abilities and soft skills alike, becoming living laboratories of collective intelligence and mutual learning.

Skills & Competences

Commons provide opportunities for individuals to learn by doing, navigating responsibilities, engaging with diverse publics, and responding to unpredictable contexts. This fosters reflexive skills—the capacity to critically assess one’s actions and positioning within social, political, and spatial dynamics. Such skills are essential for creating open, inclusive governance and are particularly relevant in today’s fragmented social landscapes. Learning in commons also emphasizes care, responsibility, and the negotiation of difference—values often underrepresented in formal education systems.

While rooted in informality, the competences acquired in commons can—and should—intersect with formal learning paths. Vocational education and training (VET) providers can benefit from engaging with commons as dynamic contexts for alternative training. These spaces offer complementary forms of education that are practice-based, community-driven, and anchored in real needs. Recognizing and valuing these learning processes, for instance through micro-credentials or partnerships with VET actors, can build bridges between grassroots innovation and institutional recognition.

To participate in a commons is to step into a complex ecosystem of co-responsibility, openness, and experimentation. It requires adaptability, communication skills, technical know-how, and a readiness to unlearn hierarchical patterns. Commons are places where knowledge circulates horizontally, where leadership is often distributed, and where each person’s contribution matters. In this sense, acting in the commons is not just about acquiring competences—it is about cultivating a different relationship to knowledge, power, and the collective.

One of BASICC’s core innovations has been to bring together commoners and vocational education actors within shared learning environments. Across several European contexts—Naples, Riga, Brussels, and Paris—the project has tested how VET and commons can co-design training modules that reflect both formal standards and situated practices. This collaboration has highlighted the added value of learning “within the commons”: through hands-on experience, collective governance, and real-world challenges.

The project’s training prototypes, such as those focused on solidarity-based catering, urban space management, or participatory research, revealed that commons environments can function as inclusive training sites. They are particularly effective in reaching audiences who are distant from formal education—offering a pathway for empowerment, employment, and civic engagement.

At the same time, VET institutions have brought crucial pedagogical structure and certification pathways. Through this exchange, BASICC has shown that common spaces and VET can be mutually reinforcing: commons provide meaningful contexts and values; VET provides frameworks for validation and scale.

This model suggests a hybrid ecosystem for learning—where bottom-up knowledge and institutional tools can co-exist, co-evolve, and better respond to today’s social, ecological, and economic challenges.

Browse
Stories
Learning horizontally: the wood workshop Werk Statt Konsum
The Werk Statt Konsum is an open woodworking workshop, offering the opportunity to realise projects to people that don't have the proper tools or enough space at home. It provides also support for building, repairing, reusing and upcycling.
Cocina! The co-working kitchen at Alte Mu
The idea of opening a coworking space is meant to help Kiel-based food start-ups that need to find a home. The idea is very simple: a shared professional kitchen significantly reduces the economical risk for individuals, while at the same time everyone benefits from the other start-ups and their respective experiences. 
Learning by being there: immersion in the Commons of Naples
In October 2024, a group of students, educators, and researchers from France, Belgium, Italy, and Latin America gathered in Naples for a three-day immersive session hosted by L’Asilo, a self-managed space recognised as a civic commons. The experience was part of BASICC, a European Erasmus+ project focused on new training pathways related to the activation […]
Commons-based Learning in action: experimenting with abandoned spaces in Riga
How often have we looked around and thought: “There are so many abandoned buildings—what if they could live again?”In Riga, this question became the starting point for a European learning experiment that brings together students, activists, architects, and municipalities to rethink disused urban spaces as sites of collective education and transformation.
Common spaces becoming VET: the case of ANCOATS
In 2023, Ancoats decided to become a training organization in its own right, and obtained Qualiopi certification, which entails demanding formalities, but at the same time provides institutional recognition of the training for participants, and enables them to have their training costs covered by their employers, their personal training account or other schemes.
Other Themes
More Themes
Want to know more?
Discover other Themes
They asked themselves: what skills are necessary for managing the commons?