Quality of Life and Learning Networks in Vienna: An Innovative Approach to a Sustainable Good Life

What constitutes a good life? Is it possible to teach it and disseminate it at local level through a participatory and community-based approach? If so, how? Our chapter takes an educational research approach to the issue and discusses a specific case where the concept of good life is being disseminated through learning networks and communities that focus on the active participation of all the social agents, including qualified teachers. We first introduce the various (educational) discourses on the ‘good life’ and the Quality of Life Movement (QoL Movement), also called Beyond GDP Movement. Next, we present and discuss the Vienna Smart City Strategy 2050—a recent policy initiative that has put collective wellbeing right at the heart of the city’s development going forward—and the social initiative known as Bildungsgrätzl (in English: learning neighbourhoods or learning networks), which brings together a number of learning communities organised by various local stakeholders who try to implement novel forms of distributed education to improve the quality of life in Viennese neighbourhoods. Finally, we use the Viennese experience as a basis for more general discussion of the implications of such initiatives and reflect on the need to develop a theory of quality of life education, a comprising framework that can provide guidance to promote practical initiatives for the improvement of individual and collective quality of life.