ORGANISATION

Oiz Egin, a Rural Development Association (RDA)  for promoting the regions of Durangaldea and Lea Artibai in Bizkaia. Both associations are responsible for ensuring the development of rural sectors in their regions.

 

CHALLENGE

To raise awareness in the rural sector of its stewardship role of the territory and to transfer this role to other agents while expanding and activating the network of agents in the territory.

 

IMPROBABLE COLLABORATOR
Zoohaus, a networked creativity platform combining the interests of agents related to architecture and other disciplines.

PRESENTED PROJECT

ITAURREAN., a networked agroecological infrastructure.

PROCESS

What resources do we have here?

Oiz Egin is a platform for promoting the regions of Durangaldea and Lea Artibai in Bizkaia. Its objectives as it embarked on the Conexiones improbables’ project were to raise awareness in the rural sector of its stewardship role in the territory and to transfer this role to other agents while expanding and activating the network of agents in the territory. Responding to this call was the Zoohaus collective, comprising professionals from architecture and other disciplines with a strong interest in networked creativity. The project is the conclusion of several months of discussions around questions such as: What does land stewardship mean today? What tangible and intangible resources are available to us? How can we organise them for a common goal?

The process was organised around Zoohaus’ Collective Intelligences tool, which serves as a mechanism to disseminate, analyse and activate ideas, document existing resources and increase their visibility.

RESULT

ITAURREAN (which means “guiding a team of oxen” in Basque) is an umbrella project on agroecological production in relation to tourism, gastronomy, education, seed custody or human capital, providing a new focus on an old “agroecological network” project whose development has been pending for a long time now.

ITAURREAN’s major objective is to improve the production and distribution of agroecological products. But it also aims to implement another series of actions related to  agroecology: create a network of people and organisations, promote agroecology as a real life alternative, analyse marketing alternatives and encourage the exchange of knowhow.