We are going through a period of insecurity, change and uncertainty, in which we need more than ever to focus on individual and collective well-being, to deal with the consequences of the recent years of pandemic and the worsening of crises in the climate, social and political fields. To this end, this research invested in the resignification of idle spaces in peripheral areas, using as a field the community of Vidigal and the teaching experience in a municipal school in the West Zone, both in Rio de Janeiro. Through the production of vegetable gardens, gardens, living areas and ecological pedagogical practices, we brought food security, self-care, and leisure activities to the residents of these locations. These transformations gave families opportunities to have other nutritional options in their daily lives, contact with ancestral learning, in addition to deepening emotional ties with their territories. Latent knowledge in the communities, but which is not put into practice due to the accelerated and aggressive way of life that the city imposes. We sought support from authors such as biologist Edward Wilson and his work Biophilia (1984) and Yi-Fu Tuan with Space and place (1983) to think about the relationships between subject and nature; voices of researchers from PUC-Rio collaborated with the premise of design in partnership, whose focus is horizontality and doing with for a real and effective construction; in the field of sustainability, we brought Ezio Manzini with Design for social innovation and sustainability (2008), who supported us in the redefinition of spaces and community well-being; also Alberto Acosta with Good living: an opportunity to imagine other worlds (2016), and Victor Papanek in Design for the Real World (1971) as stimulators of this entire discourse. With these authors we dialogue about a life focused on inclusion, sustainability, and renewal.