Well-being, Landscape and Sustainability of Communication

The paper deals with the concept of well-being and its relationship with landscape and agriculture. According to the literature, well-being is a multidimensional and subjective concept, it is related to happiness but it does not depend on mere economic welfare. In fact, the bond between material wealth and well-being is not causal: GDP is not the optimum way of assessing the level of well-being. On the contrary, there is a strict relationship between well-being, agriculture and rural development. The man/farmer, transforming the rural landscape, creates modifications that reverberate first on natural landscape, then on the whole territory, and finally back to the man itself. In this context, the generative communication arises as a model that best interprets the need to represent and promote the circular nature of the relationships between man and land. By doing this, it enhances and protects cultural diversity, social and natural environment of the territory itself. Hence, it strengthens the well-being of those who work and constantly transforms this landscape. The paper closes with the analysis of two case-studies, the “Comunicazione generativa per il Programma di Sviluppo Rurale 2014-2020 della Regione Toscana” project (in english: Generative Communication for the Tuscany Rural Development Programme, RDP, 2014-2020) and the “San Casciano Smart Place” project, both developed by the Communication Strategies Lab. The methodology used for the development of the projects is the generative communication (Toschi, 2011), with its recent specification towards the concept of sustainable communication.