Robert Dasovic & Juliette Mattijsen – The Health Commons: A caring Economy in the Ruins

Robert Dasovic and Juliette Mattijsen will invite participants into a live, imaginative experiment in collective care: a commons co-design lab. Together, will they explore what a health commons could look like in a fractured world and co-create radical principles for care through participatory dialogue, mapping, and embodied storytelling. Participants will step into the roles of caregivers, community leaders, and health system re-imaginers to co-draft a living manifesto for a caring economy in the ruins.

As extractive, profit-driven health systems crumble under the weight of inequality and ecological collapse, we urgently need new frameworks rooted in justice, solidarity, and shared responsibility. This workshop creates space to reclaim health as a collective right—not as a market service—and to reimagine governance and care from the ground up. By acknowledging systemic breakdowns and daring to build from the rubble. It merges democratic experimentation with radical imagination, offering a glimpse of how people can come together to reweave the fabric of care.

Participants will move through a dynamic process that includes collective storytelling, co-creative mapping of a health commons, small group deliberations, and the drafting of a shared ‘Manifesto for Care in the Ruins’. They will leave with a deeper sense of collective agency, a vocabulary for commons-based care, and practical tools for citizen-led deliberation and systems thinking. They’ll also carry a co-authored manifesto to inspire local action.