While the cooperative housing model has a long tradition in some regions of the world, such as Quebec and Canada, Northern Europe or Uruguay in Latin America; in others, it is a rather emergent phenomenon.
You may be subscribed to receive, every week, a basket of fruits and vegetables provided directly by a farm in your area. Or, in any case, you have surely heard of this model, also called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which originated in Japan in the 1960s and has been in place for about thirty years in North America – see for example the network of family farmers in Quebec and New Brunswick.
‘Croissant’, other than the delicious pastry, is a good adjective to describe our current economic system. The warnings about the disastrous effects of exponential economic growth are not new: they have been out there for fifty years already, following the well-known 1972 report 'The limits to growth' (Meadows et al.).
It is not unknown that the textile industry is one of the most polluting. Fast fashion, constantly providing new styles at very low prices, requires huge volumes of production with equally giant environmental impacts.
Although it may receive different names depending on the country (social economy, solidarity economy, community economy, collective entrepreneurship), in general the concept of social and solidarity economy (SSE) brings together a set of organizations whose activities - in particular the provision of goods or services - are based on common principles of social utility, democratic and participatory management, local roots and return to the community (see in this sense, for example, the definition of the SSE in Quebec according to its Social Economy Act of 2013).
